March 8 the world celebrates the International Women’s Day, and Snapchat could not be out of this celebration. The app made some filters honoring three outstanding women of the world’s history: Frida Kahlo, Marie Curie, and Rosa Parks. Sadly, Snapchat received a lot of bad critics since some users are not so happy with those filters, in particular with the Marie Curie one.
The thing that seems to bother users so much is the fact that the Marie Curie’s lens not only gives the user a scientific laboratory, but also a “smokey eye” makeup. Maybe that’s not what someone would expect when thinking about the first woman who won a Nobel Prize and remembered for her contributions to the radioactivity field.
The filters were made by Snapchat in collaboration with the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development and the Frida Kahlo Corporation.
But, how bad is it?
The Frida Kahlo’s lens gives the user a lighter skin, red lips, some flowers on the head and, of course, the characteristic thick eyebrows from the Mexican artist. On the other hand, the Rosa Park’s filter gives the user brown-coloured hair with a hat, and a pair of glasses like Parks used to wear. Users on Twitter said that the color selection was really wrong because Rosa Parks was a black woman and the lens seems to make the skin look lighter.
“In the age of the selfie, Frida is considered to be the first selfie artist, lens,” said Beatriz Alvarado from the Frida Kahlo Corporation, according to CNET.
Nevertheless, the most polemic is the Marie Curie one, which gives the user a laboratory with many scientific buckets and test tubes, and a Marie Curie with a perfect makeup.
Who were those women?
Snapchat chooses three extraordinary women to celebrate this special day. Marie Curie, for example, was a scientific from Polony who made important researches about radioactivity and was the first female to win a Nobel Prize in different areas. In fact, she died due to aplastic anemia, probably caused by exposing her whole life to radiation.
Frida Kahlo, a Mexican painter, known for her self-portraits and for her feminist job through her paintings, and remembered for being an eternal lover of her husband, Diego Rivera. Frida Kahlo died in Mexico when she was 47 years old, because of a pulmonary embolism, although no autopsy was carried out.
And the third woman, Rosa Parks, was an African-American civil rights activist who is remembered for refusing to obey a bus driver’s order to give her seat to a white passenger after the white section of the bus was all busy. The United States Congress called her “the first lady of civil rights” and “the mother of the freedom movement”. She died in 2005, when she was 95 years old, because of natural causes.
Not their first critic
This is not the first time that Snapchat is under the scope of the critics. Last spring they launched a Bob Marley filter, which generated polemics in the social networks because it gave users a colored skin and they looked that as a derision for black people.
Also, a couple of months ago, they launched another lens in which users looked like an Asian person, with a yellow skin and Chinese eyes. Snapchat was severely criticized for this decision and they had to delete it from the app immediately.
Source: CBS News