Cave drawings may have been the earliest signs of that impulse, but in more recent history, magazines and television spread and reinforced narrow beauty standards. Social media tightened them further, prizing faces that looked poreless and chiseled on camera to match the proliferation of filters. And Zoom, where users stared at themselves for hours rather than for a quick smartphone snap, contributed to spikes in cosmetic procedures.

Now, artificial intelligence, which is threatening jobs, acting as a matchmaker between people and robots, blurring the boundaries between humans and machines, and generating synthetic faces at unprecedented scale, is poised to scramble beauty standards again. The Future Laboratory heralds the dawn of the Synthocene Era, describing it as “a new epoch defined by the rise of synthetic intelligence, where machine intelligence becomes a pervasive, active force shaping culture, creativity and human experience.”

As the beauty industry watches AI’s growing influence on appearance and business, for the latest edition of our ongoing series posing questions relevant to indie beauty, we asked 13 beauty and AI executives, consultants and founders the following: How do you envision AI shifting beauty standards? How should indie brands respond to a world where authenticity and artificiality become harder to distinguish?