Use the Original Camera: A Weibo Post Reopens China's Beauty-Filter Debate
A Weibo user's advice to photograph yourself without beauty filters — because they deepen appearance anxiety — met a pointed rebuttal arguing that joy needs no reality check, and the exchange captures China's unfinished argument over the retouched face.
The advice sounded mild enough: young women would be happier, a Weibo user suggested, if they photographed themselves more with the phone's original camera — the unfiltered lens — and edited from there, instead of letting a beauty camera redraw their faces before they ever see them.
The post, published Monday by a user writing as nana, argued that beauty cameras and Douyin effects have quietly deepened a generation's appearance anxiety. Women she knows now call their unretouched selves ugly, she wrote — no longer able to accept skin texture, the shallow hollows under the eyes, makeup that sits imperfectly — because the smoothed, widened-eye default has become their mental baseline. When a friend occasionally shoots them with the real camera, the result is an afternoon of low mood. The post drew more than 2,000 likes and enough traction to put the phrase "use the original camera more" on the trending board.
By midnight the counterargument had arrived, and it is the more interesting document. "I don't really agree," wrote a user posting as Lingdongxue. Taking photos is a small pleasure that should not be turned into a test of one's face; beauty cameras exist to provide emotional value, and liking a pretty picture of yourself is not failure to accept your real body. Forcing the raw lens on people who flinch at it, she argued, deepens the very anxiety it claims to cure — "confidence does not need the original camera as its test" (自信，也不需要靠原相机来检验).
Neither side carries a photograph of anyone; the argument is conducted entirely in text, which is perhaps the point. What both posts do dispute is the premise underneath: that in China the retouched face is the default. Beauty filters are built into cameras, live-streams and video apps as a factory setting, adjustable mid-broadcast; the original camera has become a named category of its own, 原相机, a shorthand for reality check. The argument this week was never about photography. It was about which remedy anxiety deserves — the exposure sort, whose advocates say the cure is learning to recognize your own face, or the comfort sort, whose advocates say nobody owes a camera their pores.
Both posts were still sitting on the same trending page two days later, addressed to audiences that overlap almost completely: young women who filter by reflex and read both arguments to the end.