Don’t we all want to hide how ugly we are?

This is dark? Seems pretty normal to me, and not new or only the Ghibli filter. This has been a thing since MySpace and before. Take pictures at the right angle and put hearts and kisses all over your pic to distract from the parts of you that you hate.

Hell, it most likely pre-dates the internet and goes back as far as painting portraits goes.

Hot take: ugly and beautiful are meaningless subjective concepts

I mean it’s about highlighting the parts of you that you like and diminishing the parts you don’t. That’s all of aesthetics, makeups, digitial filters, and all of that.

A friend of mine turned a vacation photo of us into one of that style, and it really turned it into a movie-like vibe. So it was less about highlighting one’s ugliness but highlighting the nicest aspects of our vacation.