At a Louis Vuitton show at Paris Fashion Week on Tuesday, something about Emma Stone seemed different. If vicious criticism on social media is to be believed, she is the owner of a brand-new face. Fans noticed that Stone’s large, blue eyes seemed wider. Her lips were broader, bigger; her brow had a supernatural sheen and her skin seemed extra-smooth. She looked, as one uncharitable X user put it, “AI-generated”. Others suggested that her updated face was the work of a Beverly Hills surgeon’s scalpel.

If so, that is hard to believe. At 36, she is both exceptionally beautiful and still young by any standard — except, perhaps, Hollywood’s.

And while Stone herself has said nothing about using plastic surgery, she wouldn’t be the first young, naturally gorgeous woman who went under the knife to satisfy our increasingly bizarre beauty standards. In May, fans noticed that the face of Lindsay Lohan, 38 at the time, had been miraculously refreshed (she denied having a facelift). And on Wednesday, 35-year-old Jennifer Lawrence, once the teen heroine of The Hunger Games, was photographed at a Dior fashion show with a pout that looked puffier and cheekbones that seemed bolted on. “Why is everyone having a new face?” one commenter on X wrote. “So in future every celeb will look like one another,” groaned another.

The new celebrity “filter face”, I’d argue, is the result of social media brainwashing. Instagram has hundreds of filters that beautify a user by magnifying eyes, pinching waists and blurring skin. One, called Bold Glamour on TikTok, is so popular it has been pinpointed as a threat to users’ self-image. This filter’s aesthetic is essentially drag: fierce brows, dramatic contour and lips as big as blimps.

The look is sought after by even the youngest teens. In one survey, 87 per cent of social media users aged 13-21 said they had used a filter.

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As a result, we are changing how we look in real life, too. Cosmetic eyelid surgery is now de rigueur, with one plastic surgeon, Dr Jay Calvert, telling a board report that female patients are demanding to look “filtered”.

According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, this year there is a surge in demand for “fox eyes” — in which the corners of the lids are lifted and reshaped to look more elegantly feline (a procedure called canthopexy). Another popular tweak is called blepharoplasty, in which dreaded eyebags are deleted. (Its popularity among celebs has been called the “blephpocalypse”.) And the patients for these surgeries are skewing younger. The New York surgeon Darren Smith has said that many women are inquiring about eye surgery in “their early twenties”.

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The epidemic of filter face is a growing problem — but a profitable one for those claiming to have the answer to women’s insecurities. Last year American plastic surgeons performed 60 per cent more facelifts than they had in 2017, noting that patients for this procedure were “getting younger” — some were 35. Sherard A Tatum, president of the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, reported with glee that “rapid advances in non-invasive treatments and technologies allow younger patients entry into aesthetics with very little pain and downtime”.

At 27, I am beginning to suspect that some of my peers are dabbling in “baby Botox”. It’s possible they are inspired by Tana Mongeau, the mega-influencer (also 27) who vlogs her injection appointments, bragging: “I get Botox like it’s motherf***ing clockwork.”

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Social media promotes those who use the filters best, and so we enter an aesthetic doom loop: women are altogether looking more young, more polished, more extreme. Meanwhile, the unique qualities that make people compelling in the first place — individuality, character, quirkiness — are being erased.

We have forgotten what women really look like, and it’s making us insane.

Adolescent girls, often the most prolific users of these platforms, are particularly vulnerable. Leaked research by Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, revealed that 32 per cent of this age group felt worse about their bodies after using Instagram. Other studies have shown that using facial filters directly corresponds with having a negative body image.

Where will this all end? Maybe in the not-so-distant future it will be normal, expected even, to get a facelift in your twenties. The onward march of filter face seems unstoppable, given how unaccountable social media sites are. If so, I’m doomed to frown on the sidelines as my peers age backwards — unless, that is, I cave and get Botox. There won’t be any frowning then.