My first experience with the term “catfishing” was as a child in computing. We were taught how to stay safe on the internet from cybercrime, grooming, and financial scams—dangers to which children are especially vulnerable. Catfishing broadly refers to deceiving someone online, usually through social media or dating apps, for one’s own romantic or financial gain. The term rose to popularity after the 2010 film Catfish and the subsequent MTV reality show Catfish: The TV Show.
As the years passed and the internet became more prevalent, the term’s meaning began to transform. It came to be primarily associated with women in the public sphere who wore “too much” makeup, whose bodies fluctuated as human bodies do, and whose paparazzi photos “revealed” their authentic appearance. Catfishing thus became understood as a way to describe how a woman allegedly deceives others by enhancing or distorting her true appearance.
Online responses included “reality vs expectation” memes, side-by-side comparison pictures of female celebrities with and without makeup, and even the suggestion that men should take a woman swimming on the first date to see her face without cosmetics. Hashtags like #NoMakeup and #WokeUpLikeThis encouraged celebrities to share “makeup-free” photos, which were then scrutinised by the media. Tabloids published think pieces and sensationalist articles dissecting the “realness” of female celebrities, often describing women such as Kate Winslet, Kim Kardashian, and Mila Kunis as “unrecognisable” without professional makeup. In many of these articles, a woman’s “catfishing” or appearance without makeup was framed as negating her femininity, age, or worth in the eyes of the public. This rhetoric is not only harmful to the women being written about but also to anyone exposed to it, reinforcing unattainable beauty standards that can shape self-perception for a lifetime.
This trend coincided with spikes in parasocial behaviour, driven in part by the rise of social media, reality television, and influencer culture. As a result, the sense of public ownership over celebrities’ private lives extended to an obsessive scrutiny of female celebrities’ “real” faces and bodies. A growing expectation emerged that these women were obligated—by social contract and their fan base—to be as “real” and “unfiltered” as possible.
The re-emergence of the term catfish to describe women, and the conflation of compliance with societal beauty standards with worth, reflects society’s fixation on constant and consistent “beauty” and perfection. It’s clear that this issue is not only widely recognised but also a source of deep fascination. In the past year alone, we’ve seen the release of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, the viral “morning shed” routines on TikTok, and the popularity of minimalist “clean girl” makeup—an aesthetic that paradoxically involves dozens of steps yet is meant to appear effortless. Alas, it seems this scrutiny and these unattainable standards are here to stay.
Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash
