Google Photos just unleashed a beauty filter for 1.5 billion people

Google just quietly confirmed something the selfie industry has been doing for years, and it pulled it off with a smile and a blog post. In a new announcement, the company argues your photos should "capture how you feel in the moment," which is a pretty bold way of saying your actual face is now optional.

What Google just rolled out

The Touch Up tool is officially launching in Google Photos on Android, rolling out globally this week per Google's announcement. We got our first detailed look at this tool back in December, and the feature is now officially shipping.

It does pretty much what the leaks showed. You tap a face in your photo, choose what you want to tweak, and slide the intensity to wherever feels right.

Video by Google

How "Touch Up" works

• Heal to remove blemishes and small spots
• Smooth for overall skin texture
• Under eyes to brighten dark circles
• Irises to make eyes pop a little
• Teeth for a subtle whitening pass
• Eyebrows and lips for shaping tweaks

The tool also detects up to six faces in a group photo and lets you adjust each one individually. It should be noted that this is the kind of thoughtful detail I expect from Google Photos.

Who gets it and when

Touch Up is rolling out on Android devices with at least 4 GB of RAM running Android 9 or later. That's a surprisingly generous bar, because this isn't locked to Pixel flagships or high-end Galaxy phones.

Budget Android users get the same access, which is the kind of rollout strategy I wish more Google features followed. No word on iPhone yet, but Google Photos is cross-platform, so iOS will likely follow.

Why this is a bigger deal than Google is letting on

Google Photos has over 1.5 billion monthly users, so this instantly becomes the default beauty filter for a huge chunk of the population. That's way more reach than any TikTok filter or Samsung Gallery effect.

Samsung's Gallery offers some light facial effects, and Apple's Photos app barely does anything here. Google just leapfrogged both with a granular retouching suite baked into the most-used photo app in the world.

The "vibe over reality" controversy

My personal views on this are mixed. To be clear, I'm not anti-filter, at all. A quick under-eye brighten after a night of bad sleep, or a small blemish heal and face smoothing before posting to friends, is totally fine, and I'd use it. I do use it.

What gives me pause is Google's framing of it. Saying photos should "capture how you feel" instead of how you look is a soft way of telling people their natural look isn't good enough, and I can't say I love that from a company this influential. Especially when you consider how social media pressure is affecting kids and teens these days.

Used sparingly, Touch Up is useful. Used heavily, it pushes us into a world where every selfie looks algorithmically smoothed into the same version of "pretty," and that's where I check out.

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