Grounded in the Social Semiotic theory of communication and employing Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) as its methodological framework, this paper examines the hashtag #beautyfilters to explore how women engage discursively with beauty ideals through their online self-presentations. Beauty filters enable users to manipulate and digitally enhance their own images, shaping how they perceive and construct the self. The data consist of 67 TikTok videos collected during May 2023. From this material, we identified three broad thematic categories: Creating the “perfect” face through filters; beauty tutorials and the “digital-forensic gaze”; and authenticity in self-presentation. The findings suggest that beauty filters intensify a digital-forensic gaze directed at women’s appearances. This gaze compels women to compare their own looks not only to those of others but also with idealized, filter-generated versions of themselves. This pursuit of perfection, sustained by a neoliberal, self-objectifying gaze, encourages women to internalize narrow beauty norms and to perceive their natural appearances as inherently “not good enough.”