"Digital Makeup" Creates a New Market for Self-Discovery

This is the first installment of the serialized feature "Keywords for Predicting the Future" by the Future Prediction Support Lab. Lab members, each with their own specialized field, distill their envisioned future society into keywords from their unique perspectives, which we will introduce in this series. We hope the keywords we present will spark new ideas.

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When posting photos on social media like Instagram, the act of editing one's own photos is called "enhancing," and for young social media enthusiasts, it's no longer anything special.

Every day, they strive to make the person in the photo resemble their ideal self, using editing apps to adjust everything from the eyes and skin tone to the contours and nasolabial folds, carefully navigating the line between enhancement and overdoing it.

For the social media generation, self-image seems not fixed but rather a malleable concept that can be adapted to suit the time, place, and occasion.

With the advancement of VR and AR technologies, the barrier between the real world and the digital world is steadily lowering. In the future of social media, communication might be possible not just through photos, but through more realistic and immersive representations of oneself.

If that happens, the value of one's real-world self-image will likely decrease relatively. Instead, the virtual self-image on social media—which offers opportunities to interact with more people online—will become more important, creating a kind of value inversion.

In such a world, demand for "digital makeup" – the pursuit of an ideal self-image for social media, even at a cost – is likely to take off in earnest.

Individuals might even hire their own exclusive "digital" makeup artists, much like celebrities or models do. The skills of these "digital" makeup artists would likely create an ideal self-image rich in natural, nuanced subtlety, free from the artificial look of machine-based processing.

In the real world, attempts to alter one's appearance face physical limitations like inherent facial features and body type. However, the world of "digital makeup" knows no such physical boundaries.

Digital makeup, capable of satisfying people's boundless desire to find their ideal self, may form a surprisingly large market.

What did you think? On the Future Prediction Support Lab homepage, you can explore various keywords predicting the future beyond what we've introduced here.

Future Prediction Support Lab: http://dentsu-fsl.jp/