The Profound Sentimentality of the TikTok "Teenage Filter"

Jennifer Barnett travels back in time with the help of a popular app.

While lying in bed watching TikTok, my usual nighttime routine, I watched a video  of a middle aged woman using the “teenage filter” which apparently makes you look like you did when you were a teen. Her reaction was profound: stunned, then emotional. She started to cry. “It’s been such a long time since I’ve seen you, old  friend,” she said through tears. Whoa, I said to my phone, tears forming in my own eyes as I watched her reuniting with her former self in real time. 

My algorithm caught on that this was content I was interested in and cued up more  videos of women encountering their teenaged selves. The reactions were all on par  with the first video: women casually loading up the filter, many with initial  skepticism or insouciance, only to find themselves overcome with emotion, staring  back at a living breathing version of their much younger selves. Many of the women  were too emotional to speak. Some overlaid messages to their younger selves: “Hello old friend, I wish I had been kinder to you.” 

The reactions were all on par with the first video: women casually loading up the filter, many with initial  skepticism or insouciance, only to find themselves overcome with emotion, staring  back at a living breathing version of their much younger selves.

Forever Young by Aphaville and  Freshmen by The Verve Pipe seem to be the most popular musical accompaniments, upping the waterworks factor, but reducing the women’s reactions to vanity or pining for lost youth belies what’s really going on in the majority of these videos. It’s more philosophical than that. Some women are stunned and then crumple, others  cover their mouths and stare in silence, some are totally overcome with emotion, laughter through tears. Their reactions seemed genuine, and intense. 

Right, what Barnett actually looked like in high school. (Left is a high school friend.)

I watched video after video; some women were alone, others with their daughters or romantic partners in the shot with them. The videos with their daughters were especially moving, as the daughters looked exactly the same in both videos but the moms looked like they could be their sisters.

The daughters were freaked out; the moms were more like: Yes, I am a real person with emotions and I always have been. I am just like you in sort of a similar way to when you see paparazzi photos of celebrities out doing mundane things like grocery shopping and they are titled Celebs, Just Like You and you have a momentary realization that yeah, celebrities are not just the roles they play, they are real actual human beings with a full range of real actual  human experiences. Just like the moms on these TikTok videos.  

@sassypantsparadeAging sucks… #teenfilter #teenagelook #agingsucks #agingsuckssometimes #wishicouldrewindtime

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What’s the big deal? some people on Twitter have said, claiming they can just look at  photos of themselves as teenagers. I’d argue it’s not the same thing, as photos are  static moments caught in a time that has passed, whereas these filtered videos are  living and breathing versions of a person who was long gone, yet brought back as if  through a mystical time portal. She’s right there in her current living room  surrounded by mementos of a life lived as proof that she is in fact here now, and not  in her teenage bedroom in 1996. It’s surreal.  

Some of the videos come with content warnings. These are mostly from people  who seem to have had traumatic pasts that they have overcome, and these are the  videos that, understandingly, evoke the most emotional response. Women who  overcame abuse, who have survived despite all the obstacles, confronted with a living, breathing version of themselves from the time that was most painful to them, when they were actively struggling to survive. This is me before I had a lifetime of experiences, they say, before I had the responsibility of children, before I got  divorced, before I experienced systemic sexism that ran me out of my career.  

Many of the women  were too emotional to speak. Some overlaid messages to their younger selves;  “Hello old friend, I wish I had been kinder to you.” 

“I just want to give her a hug,” one woman says to her younger self, as her younger self says the same thing back to her current self in real time. A trans person did the filter because he’d never had the chance to see what he’d have looked like as a teenage  boy. He started to cry. How could anyone not be overcome by that? 

I’d been texting the videos to my friends who still consent to receiving forwarded TikToks from me, but I ran out of emotion emojis to include for that one. There simply aren’t sufficient emojis to express those feels. Keep up, technology, for crying out loud.  

My main question when I first encountered this was: how accurate is it? One woman held a photo of herself as a  teen and it was strikingly accurate, but I’ve seen other women tweet their disappointment that their filter didn’t look anything like what they’d looked like as  teens.  

The only thing left to do was try it for myself.  

After messing around for several minutes in my TikTok settings to find the filter, and then calling upon my actual teen to help sort me out, I found the filter and applied it and watched myself morph into teen mode. It did indeed make me look younger, but not like how I actually looked as a teen. It seemed to smooth me out, blurring the furrows, lines, and lentigines (what I like to call freckles), and generally softening my face. I looked a bit amorphous, round and undefined; the filter didn’t take into account the sharp angles of my face that have been there my whole life, regardless of my age. The person looking back at me wasn’t my teenage self, she was someone else, someone softer, free of hard edges. “Well, that’s definitely not me,” I said. “I’ve been hard edges since birth.”

I watched  video after video; some women were alone, others with their daughters or romantic  partners in the shot with them. The videos with their daughters were especially  moving, as the daughters looked exactly the same in both videos but the moms looked like they could be their sisters.

I didn’t feel disappointed though. I looked back and forth between the TikTok’ed teen version of myself and the real me. One effect the filter had for me was revealing the stark difference between the face you know, and a face that has been scrubbed of not only age, but also of character. I homed in on my real face, at 51 the oldest I’ve ever looked but simultaneously the youngest I’ll ever be. There I am, I said. It’s me.