The Magician’s Book in Your Pocket: Breaking the Spell of AI Beauty Tools

“Imagine me as the lead singer of a 90s boyband.”

I typed the prompt into my Messenger app’s AI tool and waited for the result.

It was a couple of years ago, and I’d been seeing ads for this new “Imagine Me” feature. For the simple price of giving a major corporation images of your face, this AI tool could “imagine” you as . . . well, just about anything. On this particular afternoon, I was just bored enough—and perhaps just dissatisfied enough—to give it a try.

The result came back, and I was stunned. The AI tool had given me a Y2K outfit and frosted tips, as expected. But it did a lot more than that. It took off about 50 pounds and five years. It cleaned up my skin, broadened my shoulders, sharpened my jaw . . . even added some extra sparkle in my eyes. It didn’t look like a cartoon or a caricature. It looked like me—if I had spent the past two decades in a gym instead of sitting behind a computer. This wasn’t even one of the many AI beauty tools built to give users a digital glow-up. It was just built for laughs and novelty. But it was hard to look away.

For a man who has wrestled with body image issues since the days of 90s boybands, this tool didn’t feel like a laugh or novelty. It felt like sorcery.

And I realized I could keep “imagining.” Movie star. Basketball player. Fashionable hipster in a coffee shop. All the versions of me I had always wanted to be but wasn’t. I knew this probably wouldn’t be good for my heart, but I didn’t care. I let that little AI tool imagine away, every new prompt a subtle self-indictment.

The more absurd and implausible images were easy to ignore. But some were hard to forget—the ones that looked like maybe, just maybe, they could have been real.

Friends, this is how a married man in his mid-30s reacted to a first-generation AI tool built for novelty. And I’m confident that I’m not alone.

If grown adults are susceptible to this kind of digital sorcery, imagine the impact on young teenagers who are still forming their sense of self. What I played with two years ago was small potatoes compared to the AI beauty tools available today.

Tools like TikTok’s “Bold Glamour” filter don’t just turn you into a glowed-up avatar. They rework your actual face, in real time, as you watch. Like magic. These AI beauty tools smooth skin, reshape bone structure, and enhance features with sophisticated subtlety. As Alan Noble observes,^[1] filters like Bold Glamour don’t just alter your appearance—they show you what your ideal self ought to be.

I’ve been thinking a lot about these technologies recently—about what’s really happening in our hearts in these moments that feel like sorcery. And the sharpest insight I’ve found comes from a surprising place: not from a tech critic or a developmental psychologist, but from a British professor who died in 1963. C. S. Lewis never saw a smartphone, but he knew a thing or two about “magic” and the human heart.

One scene from The Chronicles of Narnia feels almost prophetic, as the young heroine Lucy encounters a kind of magic that will sound remarkably familiar to us today, more than 70 years later.

It sure felt familiar to me.

Lucy and the Magician’s Book: AI Beauty Tools Foretold

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, written in 1952, Lucy and her comrades are sailing to the edge of the world, witnessing amazing sights, going on dangerous adventures. She feels fully alive, in both body and soul. The Narnian air is doing her good.

But on the Island of the Duffers, Lucy is called to a particularly dangerous task. She must enter a feared magician’s house, all alone, to find a spell in a great Book of Magic that will save the island’s inhabitants.

The opening pages of the Book captivate her immediately. The handwriting is beautiful, and the pictures are so lifelike they seem to move on the page. The spells themselves are mostly trivial—cures for warts and cramp, instructions for enchanted sleep—nothing Lucy actually needs. But it’s all so captivating that she can hardly tear herself away. Page after page, the pictures grow more real, more alive. She nearly forgets why she came into the room. She forgets even her friends and the adventure waiting outside.

One might wonder whether Lewis could see social media and “endless scrolling” on the horizon when he wrote this chapter. But it goes on. Lucy turns a page, and the “scrolling” stops. The words hit her: An infallible spell to make beautiful her that uttereth it beyond the lot of mortals. She is confronted with another vivid, lifelike picture—an almost impossibly beautiful woman. But it’s no stranger, no fairytale princess in the pages of the magician’s book.

It’s Lucy.

The picture grows until it’s almost life-size, and the real Lucy has to look away, dazzled by her own transformed face. But even then, Lewis writes, “she could still see a sort of likeness to herself.”

She sees kings fighting wars over her beauty, leaving devastation in their wake. Her older sister Susan, “the beauty of the family,” now looks plain and jealous next to Lucy. But nobody even cares about Susan anymore. How could they?

“I will say the spell,” Lucy whispers, knowing in her heart that she shouldn’t. “I don’t care. I will.”

Faced with the vision of her heart’s deepest desire, the answer to her deepest insecurity, everything else fades. Everything else is negotiable. She will sacrifice her mission, her family, and even the world just to grab hold of it.

Marketing, False Promises, and the Magician’s Book in Our Pockets

Teenagers today might carry these “magic books” in their pockets, but not even the best AI beauty tool or filter can actually make the user beautiful. Those “magic books,” however, are filled with advice and advertisements for plenty of things that promise to do just that. Steroids and hormones. Plastic surgery. New “miracle” weight-loss drugs. Eating disorders disguised as diet “hacks.”

Some may reach for these extreme “real world” interventions, but not all. Many other teens will just be tempted to retreat further into a virtual world where this idealized version of themselves can, in essence, become the real version of themselves. There’s no spell to utter. They simply never leave the Book.

What Lewis called “beyond the lot of mortals” no longer feels beyond anything. It’s right there on the screen, and it’s wearing your face. And with the deluge of AI-filtered images online, that impossible beauty now becomes the baseline expectation.

Whether it’s casting a spell or taking a pill, sacrificing your “real” life or sacrificing your health, achieving the impossible beauty we crave feels like a bargain that’s worth any cost.

Solid and Real and Warm

So . . . Lewis has brought us to the brink of this destruction. Lucy has made up her mind. What can stop her?

What can stop your son or daughter from destroying their God-given bodies in pursuit of an unattainable, computer-generated standard of beauty or retreating into a computer-generated life? What can stop you . . . or me?

Something quite similar to what stops Lucy.

Or I should say, Someone.

When Lucy looks back at the page, she sees a new picture—the face of Aslan, the great Lion. He is growling, showing his teeth. Afraid, Lucy quickly turns the page, abandoning the spell. That fear is a mercy, pulling her back from the edge. But it isn’t the end of the story.

Fear on its own can stop you, for a time, but it won’t change you. Not truly. Lucy didn’t say this spell, but she kept “scrolling.” More pictures, more spells, more temptations.

Only later does Lucy hear footsteps behind her, turning to find Aslan himself standing in the doorway. He’s not a picture on the page this time; he’s embodied. When Lucy first sees him, Lewis writes that “her face lit up till, for a moment (but of course she didn’t know it), she looked almost as beautiful as that other Lucy in the picture.”

She doesn’t know it, of course, because at that moment, she isn’t looking at herself. She’s looking at him.

Lewis writes that Aslan was “solid and real and warm.” Lucy runs to him and buries her face in his golden mane. She can feel his breath and hear his deep rumbling purr.

Lucy’s face lights up because she is in the presence of someone real, someone who sees her, knows her fully, and loves her anyway. It’s in this moment of sheer self-forgetfulness, looking at Aslan’s face instead of her own, that she touches true beauty. It’s fleeting and momentary, yes. Lucy is still human. She will forget. She will be tempted again, and she will fail again. But that moment of beauty was truer and more real than any picture in the Magician’s Book.

Lewis wrote the fictional character of Aslan to point us to the real, incarnate, glorified person of Jesus.

The apostle Paul writes that “we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18). We are transformed not by studying our own reflection, whether “real” or “imagined.” We are transformed by beholding Jesus.

The only hope for those who cannot look away from the sorcery of impossible beauty is the appearance of the beautiful Christ, solid and real and warm. Unlike AI beauty tools that promise glory they can’t deliver or interventions that destroy the bodies they claim to perfect, Christ alone has the power to make us truly beautiful, to make us truly whole. And he will do it.

He will do it even now, in fleeting moments . . . and one day, forever.

Beauty in the Shadowlands

I wish I could tell you that Aslan’s face appeared on my phone that afternoon to scare me away from “imagining” any more versions of myself where I am the one people look at—where I am the object of other men’s envy.

But it doesn’t always work that way here in the shadowlands, as Lewis himself reminds us.

In this overlap of the ages, the already and not yet, seeking the face of Jesus can often feel harder than we wish it did. But Jesus can always be found, and he has told us where to look—in his Word, in the breaking of bread, the taste of wine. Jesus may not appear to us now in the flesh, like Aslan did to Lucy. But the Body of Jesus, the church, is here with us . . . real and warm and solid. We see his face in the real, unfiltered faces of his people as we reflect his beauty to each other.

When I see his beauty reflected in the faces of my brothers and sisters in Christ, my friends, my wife, my two precious girls, that’s when I forget the Magician’s Book. When I look at him and forget myself, that’s when—I’m told—I’m far more beautiful than any algorithm could ever “imagine.”

As intoxicating as the Magician’s Book may be, let me humbly suggest that it’s best for us to leave it closed. If the shadowlands were all we had, this would be nearly impossible. But friend, if you are in Christ, then one day, like Lucy in the New Narnia, you will wholly and fully possess a beauty that is solid and real and warm—a beauty that will never fade. You will have the beauty of Christ himself, far surpassing anything that AI beauty tools, algorithms, or magic spells could ever deliver—a beauty that calls us, as Lewis writes, “further up and further in.”

So, close the book, my friend, and gaze at Jesus, the Real Thing.

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^[1] “The Subtle Ways TikTok is Toxic,” O. Alan Noble, You Are Not Your Own Substack, Oct. 14, 2024

Article image taken from the 2010 film version of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.