In March 2021, Annie Bonelli posted a video on TikTok of her lip-synching to the song “I Know” by D. Savage. Annie was 16 at the time, and soon became dubbed “scar girl” on the app for the scar on the left side of her face from an injury in 2020. Over the past two years, as Annie’s virality has grown (reaching over 821k followers and counting), her scar has changed in colour and shape. Its atypical healing has become a full-on conspiracy on the app, inspiring people to scour her videos for clues and make countless claims that she’s faking it. Even a ‘TikTok doctor’ has weighed in. Our obsession goes beyond mere curiosity, it says a lot about the state of “authenticity” on the internet right now.
While it really doesn’t matter if Annie is faking her scar or not — and there’s no point piling onto the bullying of a teenager — the “scar girl” conspiracy online does give a concerning insight into how algorithms could fuel (sometimes dangerous) behaviour in the pursuit of uniqueness. We saw it back in 2015 when model Sarah McDaniel went viral for her two different coloured eyes, only to be accused of faking heterochromia. With the TikTok algorithm, and the internet at large, putting people into boxes in a split second, it’s easy to understand how the search for a defining physical attribute would take place. By putting Annie into the category of “scar girl”, was she given any reason to expect that the internet validation would remain, even if her scar faded completely?
Dr. Melissa Doft, double board-certified plastic surgeon and founder of Doft Plastic Surgery, says that, while scars still remain undesirable in most beauty arenas, “the addition of deformities and conditions to the beauty industry is a direct response to the over-filtered life that most of us lead”. This, she says, bleeds over into plastic surgery requests. “Plastic surgeons are trained to define beauty through using classic beauty proportions which are often the same proportions that artists have used to delineate beauty throughout the ages,” she says. “The search for uniqueness challenges our beauty ideals and thus, [our] surgical goals.” The most common requests, nowadays, she says, are to keep what were once imperfections post-surgery: a small hump during a rhinoplasty, leaving a mole or keeping the remnants of heavy eyelids in an upper blepharoplasty (more commonly known as an eyelid lift).
The pursuit of a unique, defining feature is also not new. For years, fans were baffled by Kelly Rowland’s forever-moving mole placement, only for the singer to later reveal that it’s a tactic to hide blemishes by making them look like moles instead. Kylie Jenner has famously shown off her own leg scar, from an old childhood injury, in photoshoots for years. Then there are the faux freckle hacks on TikTok. With a number of models gaining attention from modelling agencies for their real freckles, the line between what’s an acceptable thing to fake is blurry. On top of that, people on TikTok love to dive into full-fledged online investigations, whether that’s accusing beauty influencers of lying about wearing eyelash extensions or brands like Charlotte Tilbury of engaging in witchcraft. It’s the same culture that recently resulted in users visiting the village where Nicola Bulley went missing, harassing locals in the pursuit of being the one person to solve the tragedy (because, of course, that would go viral).
Jamie Cohen, assistant professor of Media Studies at CUNY Queens College and head of education at Digital Void, says we’re living in an era of “reaction reactionaries”. “There’s this adage that we use in social media studies that everything online is the cinnamon challenge and everything is also couch guy,” he says. Jamie, like myself, feels sorry for Annie and views the “scar girl” conspiracy as collateral damage from the algorithm. “The last decade has really been spent scaling platforms and now we’re watching their rise and fall which is arguably the reason why these stories are happening,” he suggests. “Since there are no more ideas of the platform itself scaling, the content creators are figuring out how to scale themselves.”
Jamie says that content creators become stuck in boxes for virality’s sake, pushed to further lean into what made them viral in the first place. “What the algorithm has done with them is that when you create a piece of content that goes viral, you can’t repeat the viral act for the next piece of content,” he says. “You have to up it in one way or another. So all content becomes extreme, not just politically extreme, but, eventually, it becomes extreme just by the need to keep being seen.” This extends beyond the beauty world; he’s noticed users going from innocuous skateboarding videos to prank videos to eventually doing hardcore stunts.
Unlike other social platforms, Jamie says that TikTok is about “fame and clout” rather than money chasing. This is something that scares him, as there’s no predicting where that takes us next. “There’s no way to explain virality to someone outside of the internet or how it feels when that happens,” he says. “I don’t think it’s replicable in many places in real life, without going to an amusement park or snowboarding, and so it’s easy to at least attempt at reproducing the content that goes viral. But when you do that, you are also changing who you are.”
Trying to figure out whether an 18-year-old is drawing a scar on her face is a pointless pursuit, like so much of our time spent on social media. It’s also a further distraction from the very real (and extreme) things happening in real life, Jamie says. “We take Scar Girl and we make her somewhat political, but we’re not focusing on things that are ideologically extreme that are happening in the background. We’re not seeing things where laws and systems are changing in real-time and instead we’re absorbed by these false dramas that are online that have nothing to do with us.” In other words, it’s a good day to drink water, mind our business and worry less about what each individual user is doing on a platform, and instead about which path the platform, itself, is taking us down as a collective.