Ever wanted to see Snape in full glam make-up or Timothée Chalamet with a smokey eye?
If you’re clued up in the world of meme culture, you’ve definitely heard of the “yassify” trend.
And if you’re not, it’s a hilarious new craze that alters a person’s face past point of recognition – and it’s taken the internet by storm.
In recent years, we’ve seen how Instagram and Snapchat beauty filters can completely change our faces and a lot of us are even using them regularly.
Well, to yassify something takes it to a whole other level by completely exaggerating these beauty features – and we mean exaggerating.
From luscious long lashes to pouty lips to flawless contour, by layering beauty filter after beauty filter, yassification takes an image – usually of a celebrity or figure from pop culture – and makes it unrecognisable.
https://twitter.com/YassifyBot/status/1460770056107872262
The term first surfaced among the LGBTQ+ community in 2020 and has since gone viral. Now, almost every public figure you can think of has been yassified.
Things really kicked off when a yassification of Toni Collette in the movie Hereditary exploded all over Twitter.
https://twitter.com/pussypearI/status/1457788372303310849?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1457788372303310849%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.buzzfeednews.com%2Farticle%2Fdavidmack%2Fyassify-meme-yassification
It’s hilarious and, honestly, it makes a good point about just how altered images can be online and how trivial beauty trends really are.
YassifyBot is a Twitter account at the centre of this trend. The person behind the viral account is 22-year-old non-binary art student Denver Adams.
“It’s one of those things that I think, anything that has some sort of ridiculousness to it can be funny,” they told Teen Vogue.
“I don’t know if there’s a deeper meaning behind this meme trend, but if I had to theorise it, it would be that it’s kind of making light of how ridiculous this AI technology is… I would say that it’s satire.”
https://twitter.com/YassifyBot/status/1459996861377486855?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1459996861377486855%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.popbuzz.com%2Finternet%2Fviral%2Fyassification-memes-yassify-filter-app-how%2F
The process itself is fairly simple. While there’s no app dedicated exclusively to the trend, most people use Faceapp – a photo editing app.
All you have to do is upload an image and layer on the filters to the point of ridiculousness.
— Yassify Bot (@YassifyBot) November 23, 2021
We’ve witnessed many crazy filter trend come and go. First, there was the face swap filter that allowed you to trade faces with your friends, next there was the one that showed us how we’d look as old people, and then there was the gender swap filter. Yassificaion is just the latest of the wild world of AI face filters.
But just as fast as trends take over the internet, they begin to die, and Denver feels like yassification probably won’t be around for much longer.
“It’s definitely already dying,” they said. “I’ve joked about it a few times on Twitter, but if anyone ruined the joke, it was me. It was absolutely 100% me. I drove it into the ground, as fast as you can drive a trend into the ground.”
https://twitter.com/YassifyBot/status/1461141331615657984
So, if you want to give it a go, now’s the time to yassify yourself into looking unrecognisably flawless. If nothing else, it’ll give you a laugh and show you just how deceptive these filters can be.
