If you’ve been playing around with your Instagram Story filters or watching stories from Instagrammers like Rosalia.vt and Ellen Sheidlin, you might have noticed how filters have put aside the creation of cute bunny ears and googly eyes to make room for a new psychedelic and shimmery style of masks.
Instagram announced last May they had jumped on a beta project with a group of digital artists to create custom face filters – with the most popular trend to come out of the project being filters with a more futuristic feel. The glimmering trend flags a new era of filters, with everyone from Makonnen to Teddy Quinlivan wanting a glossy, polished face.
But what’s making them so popular? Berlin-based designer, Johanna Jaskowska (@johwska), who created one of the most popular filters that seemingly boosted the trend, Beauty3000, said in an interview with i-D, “Beauty plays a huge role in augmented reality filters. But beauty doesn’t automatically mean make-up. I’ve been really influenced by photography, cinema, and futuristic things. If you think about photography for example, it’s the perfect lighting that makes the model more beautiful. With AR, you can fake that light.”
In order to retrieve the custom face filters, users need to be following the Instagram accounts of the designers. As a result, filter designers such as Clay Weishaar (@wrld.space) and Tomas Posse (@tokyyto) have seen their Instagram following jump up into the 100K+ in just a matter of months.
Always a fan of checking out Instagram’s latest ventures, we’ve rounded up the top five favourite filters by the most popular digital artists so you can try them out for yourself. All you need to do to gain access to these filters is be following the creator’s Instagram account… get ready to #GetLit.
1. Beauty3000 by Johanna Jaskowska | @johwska
The filter that designer Brenda Cardenas(@cardenasbrend) claimed to The Verge “made everything explode”. Beauty3000 delivers a sheer mask-like effect peppered with pink white and green reflective light, giving the face a polished, somewhat bionic look.
2. Parabola by Exitsimulation
With many of Exitsimulation’s creations putting a sci-fi twist to a very Dali-worthy vibe, Parabola took centre stage with its hypnotic design, featuring metallic masks of your own face revolving around your head.
3. Self Help by Fvckrender
This designer seems to love turning internal turmoil into art and we’re obsessed with its aesthetic outcomes. With titles like TENSION and CONFRONT, you can kind of get an idea of the digital artist’s tastefully bleak vibe. But the one that makes top on the list is Self Help which shows crystal chrome hands that partially conceal the features of your face to create an artistic statement for your Stories.
4. Pizza Crown by Clay Weishaar | @wrld.space
Weishaar gave us the perfect way to tell people exactly what was on our minds with her filters that have our favourite fast foods circling heads and symbolising our forever cravings. But, of course, pizza, as the king of fast food, stepped up to form its own ruling crown.
5. Woop by Tomas Posse | @tokyyto
This multi-filter provides a range of filter styles, from coats of multicoloured light to exaggerated eyes, all at the tap of your screen. One of the most popular of these filters is the whimsically-styled cartoons, which Posse seems to be branding his art with, that patch themselves onto your skin like a face painting.
Main image: From The North using the Beauty3000 filter by @johwska
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