Beauty in general is bad for people’s mental health, the only difference is that filters and retouching create beauty at scale. People can still encounter beauty in real life and despair that they will never attain that.

I find that people say retouched or filtered photos are not “real life”, but I’ve definitely seen people in real life who are just as attractive as any person that uses a filter. It can definitely be “real life”, but encountering these people is rare enough that people assume that level of perfection cannot possibly exist. In reality it just doesn’t exist at the frequency in which filtered images would have you believe.