I’m the Child of a Facetune Mom

When Sabrina Coleman was in high school, she went through her mother’s phone in search of photos of herself. When she found them, something seemed…off. “I was like, ‘Oh, my skin’s a little pale and very smooth,” Coleman recalls. All the photos, she realized, had been edited to lighten her skin tone and erase her acne. She and her mother use completely different social media platforms, so until this moment Coleman wasn’t aware that her mom was editing photos of her before she posted them. She brushed it off, but a few years later—when Coleman was 20 and experiencing weight fluctuations through college—it happened again. She discovered a photo her mother posted online in which her face and arms were digitally slimmed. “That was the first time [to my knowledge] she more drastically edited my body,” she recalls.