Eight New Ways to Lie About Your Breakfast

Instagram added new tools in April 2015—eight color overlays you could stack on top of whatever filter you were already using, plus fade and highlight controls. The product blog wrote about it like a creative revolution. It was, more precisely, several more ways to make a bowl of cereal look cinematic.

The filter arms race was already in full swing. VSCO was eating Instagram’s lunch on the aesthetics side; Snapchat was trying to be something different entirely. Instagram’s answer was more tools, which meant more ways for the feed to look simultaneously personal and identical. Every golden-hour shot started to resemble every other golden-hour shot, just at different color temperatures. Slumber. Crema. Ludwig. You know the ones.

I used them. Still do sometimes. There’s something almost honest about the Instagram aesthetic when you admit what it actually is: a way of making the world look the way you wished it had looked while you were standing in it. Slumber makes everything feel like a memory even before you’ve left the room. That’s either beautiful or quietly depressing, and I’ve never fully landed on which.

The color tints mostly felt like overkill. The fade tool I genuinely liked. Washing out the blacks a little makes a photo look found rather than taken. Whether that’s an artistic choice or just a comfortable lie about the moment is a question I’ve stopped asking.