Where growing up used to be about learning new lessons and trying your best, today your formative years often place a pressure on students to be perfect. Social media often turns filters into reality, making kids chase impossible standards one scroll at a time. Gallup surveyed 1,591 teenagers and found that teenagers spent “an average of 4.8 hours every day on social media platforms. Girls spent 5.3 hours on social networks daily, compared to 4.4 hours for boys.”

Tiktok is one of many social media platforms that affect teens’ perfection standards. Healthline demonstrates idealizing dangerous habits on social media “A 2022 study on TikTok and diet culture found that popular TikTok content often promotes disordered eating habits to viewers, presenting thinner body types as more ideal and preying on the viewers’ insecurities around their bodies.” Another form of social media that affects teens’ perfection standards is Instagram. Alyvia Young, a senior, highlights one social media platform that affects her the most.

“Instagram [is the most impressionable app] because they are taking photos of certain aspects of your life, and you’re only showing a certain part of your life to make it seem perfect,” Young said.

Social Media is mostly fake. People make sure to pick the perfect picture so everyone who sees it thinks it’s perfect too, however, that is likely not the case. Healthline speaks about the unrealistic beauty standards on the internet “Filters and editing tools can be fun to play around with, but it’s easy to forget that many of the pictures you see on social media are edited. Plus, people tend to post their most attractive, exciting, positive pictures online — not of their mundane, everyday appearance.” Kaylen Alexander, a junior, highlights how she overcame social media’s effect on beauty standards.

“You always have to tell yourself that you’re the best you can be, you’re pretty, you’re beautiful, you’re the only version of you. If anyone else tries to put you down, ignore it, because you’re the best. People also make sure that they look perfect on social media, so you have to realise that nobody is perfect and it’s all editing. They make sure to pick the perfect picture or video to post,” Alexander said.

Teens have a lot of advice because they have experienced perfection standards on the internet.

“You’re beautiful… like no matter what people tell you, you’re beautiful, you’re amazing. People are probably not as worried about you as they are about themselves. There’s 3,000 people in this school, they don’t care what you’re doing. They don’t care how you look, I don’t care how you look, you’re beautiful, you’re great,” senior Kaylne Orr said.

Social media affects teens everywhere. It holds impossible standards on people that are almost impossible to fill. Most photos you see on the internet are edited or specifically picked to be the perfect one. You just need to remember that you’re perfect NO MATTER WHAT. And you are the only you so it shouldn’t matter what people think because there is no one like you.