Screens are the new mirror: How AI is steadily rewriting our self-image

Google's "Nano Banana" trend feels playful, but its soft edits and nostalgic glow reveal how deeply screens now shape our self-image and the way we measure our own faces

My Instagram feed has recently been looking a little different, yet strangely familiar. Almost every frame shows a woman in a red saree posed against the same warm ochre wall, lit by the same gentle sidelight, her shadow falling in a gentle arc behind her. The faces change, the drapes shift, but the image barely does. Their skin appears cinematically smooth, the colours deepened to a quiet glow, the expression held in that delicate place between candid and composed. It’s as if the photos were taken in a single room, one where the front camera understands exactly what we hope to see.

 

These portraits come from Google’s Gemini Nano, the “Nano Banana” trend that turns regular selfies into retro-style images. The tool smooths the skin, adjusts light, and folds everyone into the same nostalgic frame. One filter, repeated with surprising consistency. 

This moment has been a long time coming. A few years ago, photographs posted online looked like the days they emerged from. Facebook albums held rugged corridors, awkward birthdays, red-eye grins, and flashes that washed out half the room. They weren’t flattering, but they were unguarded and that honesty carried its own weight. Early Instagram had the same roughness: A Valencia sky, a half-bright food plate, edges that blurred simply because no one cared enough to fix them.

 

Gradually, that texture receded. Filters grew subtler but more decisive. Faces softened. Facetune became routine. Good angle and golden-hour lighting stopped being lucky and became instructions. Editing apps like Lightroom and PicsArt added their own AI (artificial intelligence) touches of lifting shadows, smoothing skin, brightening eyes — small shifts that eventually shaped the default way a photo “should” look. Around the same time, studies on Indian campuses began noting rising discomfort among students about their appearance, often linked to hours spent scrolling through curated feeds.

 

And then the pandemic arrived with a magnifying glass none of us asked for. Zoom calls became small, persistent mirrors. Pores, jawlines, uneven tones — all of it appeared harsher. Psychologists globally started reporting the same pattern. People weren’t comparing themselves with celebrities but with their own on-screen reflection, flattened and unforgiving. A study from the American Psychological Association later found that young adults who halved their social-media use reported marked improvements in body image within weeks. The pressure wasn’t aspiration; it was the sheer weight of self-surveillance.

 

So when tools like Gemini Nano offered a gentler skin and softer light, the instinct to try them came less from vanity and more from wanting a brief escape. The red-saree portraits weren’t only aesthetically appealing. They allowed people to momentarily step outside the bluntness of the front camera. The nostalgia was styling. The comfort lay in meeting a version of themselves that felt warmer, less exposed, and easier to accept.

 

But comfort has its limits. The more convincing these portraits become, the more quietly they reset the benchmark. The screen stops recording and begins guiding. It shows not just who we are but who we might look like with a few quiet adjustments. Once that suggestion settles in, the unedited version feels unfinished. Compliments now gain weight only when they arrive beneath a post as heart-eye emojis. Studies across regions have noted the same cycle: The more time people spend retouching or monitoring their appearance online, the less comfortable they feel with their reflection offline.

 

Even so, a quieter resistance has taken shape. Many used the AI portraits purely for the pleasure of it — a brief step into a cinematic frame. Others leaned in the opposite direction posting raw, uncorrected photos as a kind of soft rebellion. Photos with swollen eyes, uneven tans or hair that refused to stay in place now feel like small acts of honesty.

 

Perhaps this is the paradox we now inhabit. The screen lets us try on versions of ourselves that feel polished or dramatic, yet it also pulls us away from the face the mirror recognises without hesitation. “Mirror, mirror on the wall...” once belonged to fairy tales, now we say it quietly to our front cameras, knowing it’ll always show something slightly unreal, a reflection almost but not quite like us. 

The mirror was kinder. It told the truth without asking us to be perfect for it. The screen, for all its glow, is far more unforgiving for it remembers every angle we wish it didn’t.