IS it me or is everyone beginning to look very weird? Almost every picture you see of a young woman in the media is one of those peculiar profile pictures that have become ubiquitous in their distorted downward pouting pose so that each picture is unrecognisable from all the others.

With the aim of achieving exactly the same look, they also plaster on over-the-top drag-queen make-up, with huge lips made to look even bigger with plasticine colours and lip liner in a contrasting colour, eyes so heavy with false eyelashes they can barely look up from their mobile phones and thick pancake foundation overlaid with blusher smeared beneath their cheekbones to create a skull-like hollow.

You can also see this selfie look on any number of reality TV shows, where in the trailers (I can’t bear to watch the actual shows) the participants look so bizarre I actually think they are pantomime clowns masquerading as real human beings.

For young women, the alternative to the clown look is the semi-porn pose, with a mostly naked body disfigured in a twisted and stretched posture to emphasise either breasts or buttocks, their phones aimed down their cleavage or behind their behind.

These grotesque images masquerade on the world wide web of deceit as some sort of girl power or female empowerment but I can’t see how turning yourself into an anonymous mask or quasi-porn star achieves that.

These hideous pictures hide a real face and a real personality, turning a unique person into one of countless anonymous automatons.

It’s a horrible “fashion” that should be sounding warning bells because now, more than 15 years since the first social media platform was launched, it should surely be perceived as a sign of mental illness.

Just as anorexia nervosa can indicate a desire for desexualisation; that is, that a sufferer wishes to starve away any signs of sexual attractiveness; is it possible that this desire to hide in plain sight is also symptomatic of something more sinister?

While it may allow some to feel safe and secure as one of a similar group of people by giving them a sense of “belonging”, the profile picture could also have become so popular because it enables people to follow the crowd and blindly obey other people’s rules because it gives them permission to abstain from thinking for themselves.

They don’t even have to bother thinking about bucking the trend; instead they expend all their energy on fitting in with society’s expectations.

There is also a link between anonymity and abusive behaviour, with a hidden identity enabling people to unleash rude, aggressive or illegal behaviour because they know there will be few or no consequences.

Women tend to change their profile pictures often, a narcissistic tendency, and to smile more than men in their profile pictures, because they are ultra-aware of how they want to portray themselves to the world and on social media, it is actually the whole world that can see that all-important picture.

A first impression is formed in nano seconds and a woman’s frequent picture changes could be symptomatic of an unhealthy desire to please and to be accepted, based purely on their looks.

Perhaps the selfie queen fears being trolled if they dare to buck the trend and look different from the rest of the crowd.

Social media has exploited a human desire to be accepted and praised with its facility for users to “like” pictures or not, but it simultaneously gives people with a nasty streak the facility to bring down anyone they want by publicly criticising the way they look. In a way, women who post these profile pictures are asking for trouble because they are putting themselves on display, out there for the world to see, inviting criticism as well as praise and indifference, which can hurt just as much.

My Year 11 son tells me that only about 20 per cent of the profile pictures posted by girls in his year are what he would describe as “normal”. The others are exactly as I have described above, four-fifths of the next generation of women already paranoid by their mid-teens about their looks and the way they present themselves to the world.

Increasingly, that look is appearing in real life, in the girls and young women you see on the streets of Brighton. I’d hate to think it’s the new norm but sadly I suspect it is. And the problem with this new norm is that they simply can’t see how bizarre they look.

How sad that so many young women feel so insecure about their looks that they have to hide behind a mask, afraid to reveal their true selves, afraid the world won’t like what it sees if they do.