I reached out to TikTok, and the effect stopped appearing two days later. I sent a video of it in action to coworkers and my Twitter followers, asking them to open the app and try the same thing on their own phones: from their responses, I learned that the effect only seemed to affect Android phones. I suspected, but couldn’t tell for sure, that my skin had been smoothed as well.
Once I started making a video, the change to my jaw shape was obvious.
I’m a TikTok lurker, not a maker, so it was only after seeing Dawn’s video that I decided to see if the effect appeared on my own camera. As the videos spread, many users wondered whether the company was secretly testing out a beauty filter on some users. Videos like these circulated for days in late May, as a portion of TikTok’s users looked into the camera and saw a face that wasn’t their own. “Is that why I’ve been kind of looking like an alien lately?” said one.
