When the original video came out there was no social media. To what extent do you think social media is responsible for the increase in eating disorders, self-harm and body image issues that we are seeing now?

Fiona Jane Burgess: I think it would be too simplistic to suggest that social media is solely responsible for the rise in mental health issues we’re seeing in young people, but for many years I’ve worked in an adolescent psychiatric unit as a drama facilitator, so I’ve seen first-hand the reality for many young people who are struggling with mental health issues and its relationship to their online existence, so that’s why this feels like a really poignant concept for this video.

With this film, I wanted to explore the tension between progression versus regression in terms of beauty standards and how our cultural relationship to it has evolved in the last twenty years. On the one hand, body positivity has had a radical impact, with activists fighting to make the beauty industry a far more welcoming space with more diversity on runways and on our screens, reflecting an acceptance and celebration of difference.

But on the other hand, there has been a huge surge in self-harm, body dysmorphia and alterations, plastic surgery, and an entire generation of teenagers wanting to look like the filters on their phone screens, a sort of Kardashian effect. Who knows to what extent social media is responsible, but I think the correlation between the two is undeniable.

Do you think beauty standards are worse now than they have ever been?

Fiona Jane Burgess: Only time will tell. I think there’s a kind of tug-of-war going on in the beauty industry, and that’s having a confusing and complicated wider cultural impact. I think we are definitely beginning to see more inclusion and acceptance of body diversity within certain areas of commercial advertising and within the fashion and beauty industries at large, however, I think this is in direct conflict with the hyper-perfect presentations of self we see online and still exist in most mainstream advertising. The rise in self-harm and plastic surgery speaks for itself. In the past 18 years, the number of cosmetic procedures for men has increased by more than 273 per cent and the number of cosmetic procedures for women has increased by more than 429 per cent.

What worries me is that I think we are creating a cultural environment where it is normal to wish you looked different in some way, to want to change something about yourself, to perpetually feel inadequate and less-than. Despite a growing inclusion of plus-size models and activists, for example, I worry that it’s easier to feel bad about yourself than it is to feel good. One study found using social media for as little as 30 minutes a day can negatively change the way young women view their own bodies. Nearly 80 per cent of young teenage girls report fears of becoming fat.

It’s hard to know whether this is worse than it has been in previous generations, but when I think about my childhood growing up without social media, I feel like I definitely wasn’t very aware of my body or my self-image, in a positive way. I think the problem is that it’s impossible for children to avoid social media nowadays, and it’s normal to apply filters to edit the way you look, for example. I can’t imagine what impact this would have had on me, because I don’t remember feeling particularly self-conscious or self-aware until my body began to change and develop, and even then there were no smartphones or selfies. It’s hard to know if things will get better or worse from here, but I think we are already beginning to see the impact.