Digital beauty filters are pervasive in social media platforms. Despite their popularity and relevance in the selfies culture, there is little research on their characteristics and potential biases. In this article, we study the existence of racial biases on the set of aesthetic canons embedded in social media beauty filters, which we refer to as the Beautyverse. First, we provide a historic contextualization of racial biases in beauty practices, followed by an extensive empirical study of racial biases in beauty filters through state-of-the-art face processing algorithms. We show that beauty filters embed Eurocentric or white canons of beauty, not only by brightening the skin color, but also by modifying facial features.

中文翻译：

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镜子，墙上的镜子，谁是最白的？社交媒体美容滤镜中的种族偏见

数字美颜滤镜在社交媒体平台上普遍存在。尽管它们在自拍文化中很受欢迎且具有相关性，但对其特征和潜在偏见的研究却很少。在本文中，我们研究了社交媒体美容滤镜中嵌入的一组审美准则（我们称之为“美容宇宙”）中是否存在种族偏见。首先，我们提供了美容实践中种族偏见的历史背景，然后通过最先进的人脸处理算法对美容滤镜中的种族偏见进行了广泛的实证研究。我们表明，美颜滤镜嵌入了欧洲中心主义或白色美的准则，不仅通过提亮肤色，还通过修改面部特征。