Apps that let small children beautify selfies are ‘abhorrent’

CHILDREN as young as four are able to manipulate their images to be more beautiful through online selfie apps and games condemned as “abhorrent” and damaging to young people’s mental health.

Facetune, among the top ranked apps last year on Apple store and made available for free to children aged four and over, enables users to enlarge their eyes, thin their noses and supersize their lips.

Games that challenge girls to beautify images and dress up for a “dream date” were found by researchers to undermine eight and nine-year-old girls’ body confidence and self-worth after just 10 minutes of playing.

Dr Amy Slater, deputy director of the University of West of England’s Centre for Appearance Research, which conducted the study, said such gamification of appearance was “abhorrent”.

“These firms are profiting financially off appearance concerns and insecurities,” she said.

Dr Jon Goldin, vice-chairman of the adolescent and child faculty of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said: “These apps would seem to reinforce and indeed amplify children’s anxieties about how they look, which is reprehensible in my view and detrimental to young people’s mental health.

“Young people have enough challenges and stresses, including about their appearance, without adults designing commercial apps to profit from these and exacerbate their difficulties.”

Facetune and Facetune2, together downloaded more than 50 million times, are two of the most popular among hundreds of such apps.

Lightricks, the creator of Facetune, was approached for a comment.