iPhone XS Beautygate: Is There A Hidden Beauty Mode?

Apple just sent out iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max in the hands of fans and already spirits are getting heated. Dubbed the “Beautygate”, the latest storm on social media accuses Apple of hiding a beauty mode in the iPhone XS Max front camera.

Started by a popular vlogger from Unbox Therapy and called “Beautygate,” the discussion soon reached all corners of the Internet, where more users chimed in.

“So it looks like, whatever processing is going on here, with the facial recognition, and this smart HDR and whatever extras are there — because it’s even happening with Smart HDR turned off — is resulting in this almost covert beauty mode, this secret beauty mode,” said YouTuber Lewis Hilsenteger from the Unbox Therapy channel.

This was confirmed by Reddit users and iPhone XS Max owners from communities like the Macrumours forums.

 

“I got the XS Max to try out and that was the first difference I really noticed. Oh every iPhone before the XS, my skin in the light at my university through the front-facing camera looked so awful and shiny. I implemented an elaborate skincare routine to make it look better under fluorescent lights. Never worked. Always shiny.

The XS Max made my skin look so good I thought Apple was doing a filter as Snapchat does. Then I brought a hand held mirror in from home and tested the X, XS Max and the mirror in the same lighting. There is a drastic difference, with the XS Max showing my skin much better. Comfortingly, it’s closer to what the mirror was showing, so I had all this anxiety about having unpresentable skin at school for no reason,” said redditor mime454.

Another one did not beat around the bush and said the iPhone XS Max selfie camera “looks like a f–ing Samsung camera,” referring to the fact that beautification filters like this one are extremely popular in Asian regions. In Korea, beauty modes are extremely popular, so some speculated that this is Apple’s way of scoring a win in that area.

Also read: ✍iPhone Xs and iPhone Xs Max Breakability Test: Watch Them Take A Dive✍

Another explanation for the fuzzy, beauty-mode iPhone XS Max selfies can be a noise reduction algorithm that’s overzealous. That seems to be a likely answer, as Apple did spend a lot of time at launch event talking about the new technology inside the iPhone XS camera.

“We set a reference frame and fuse in information from multiple frames. The image I saw was a composite of multiple frames. Some of those frames contained pieces of what would become the final image, like the perfectly sharp hair and water. As you stack the frames, if you have the same image, you have lower and lower noise and better and better detail,” explained Sebastien Marineau-Mes, Apple’s director of camera hardware in an interview.

So far, Apple has not issued a response to Beautygate but we’ll keep an eye out for it, so stay tuned. How about you, did you notice anything weird with the iPhone XS Max frontal camera?

Also read: ✍‘Shot on iPhone XS’: Apple Shares 4K and Time-Lapse Video✍