I haven't. Can you recommend a good one?

Came here to say this

I said online, and in movies. In person most people look like people.

Plastic surgery is intended to make you look beautiful, not ugly. Are we in opposite world???

It's just meant to mark you as high status.

Being part of that elite group has social and material benefits, so there's plenty of reason for people employ these kind of identity markers. Elite groups often have onerous behavior or other requirements - body modification like plastic surgery is quite common. Cranial deformation, foot binding, etc.

There's an actress in Three Body Problem who is completely distracting because of all her plastic surgery, makeup, and filters. She's supposed to be a doctorate of physics, but she looks like a TikTok influencer. Every scene with her destroyed any immersion that the scenes without her had established.

Well, I wouldn't say that plastic surgery is intended to make you look beautiful. It's intended to alter your looks in the way that you prefer. All that matters is that the person getting it done is happy with the result. Not some other random person who isn't them.

Also, beauty standards change a lot. Just look at how fashion changed from the middle ages through the Renaissance and after. You can tell what features were important by how garments were designed.

I'm not a fan of duck lips either, but I also don't have to get them.

I know pornstars and porn makeup and porn production changed. Many women left the industry in response, directly/indirectly. I read it in a really fascinating article from way back, so it's kinda fuzzy but that was the gist. Then we got Sasha Grey (⁠｡⁠♡⁠‿⁠♡⁠｡⁠) I wonder if those are connected.

Pornstars are younger and more beautiful than they were in the SD era, but look more "normal" and less like brokendown strippers. But things like lip injections and Botox play well on camera, but look fucking awful in person. I feel like I'm honing in on some thesis statement but I'm on the toilet so whatever.

Yeah but we weren't very good at it until digital filters. In really old movies they make the close ups of women slightly blurry.

Why would I want them to remember someone who doesn't look like me?

Exactly! It's even a problem with professional videoconferencing programs like Zoom. When you meet someone on Zoom it's always somewhat of a shock when you meet them in person.

I specified in my post where it is a problem, and real life wasn't one of the places.

I don't understand the endgame with posting fake pictures if you are actually looking for dates. I mean, presumably you will see each other in real life, wouldn't the look of disappointment be kinda soul crushing? I don't photograph well and honestly the only time I was glad about that was the brief foray into the world of meeting guys online. It was kinda nice to be able to show up looking better than the pictures.

Also, OP - I don't think yours is an unpopular opinion - I thought you were going to be complaining about the more extreme styles we see around now. Online photo editing I thought was pretty universally held in disdain. It's harmful in so many ways. People editing themselves then wishing they looked like the edited pictures. People seeing pictures they think are real but have been nipped and tucked with Photoshop, then being upset they can't have those proportions at any weight (because most of us have ribs!).

Though to be fair, the push for unnatural proportions predates the editing software, I remember my mom telling me that in "her day" girls had smaller waists and bigger hips, and I was skeptical because evolution doesn't work that fast, both me & my sister are built more straight up and down, were skinny. When I asked for clarification she said it was foam rubber and girdles, it was a style they achieved by padding out the butt and hips. So smaller waist yes, smaller all around, but not somehow magically all curvy. Regular skinny with foam padding.