Being black pretty much affects every part of life. It’s not just the things that people think about either.

For a long time black skin has been not-exactly considered when it comes to popular photo filters used with software such as Instagram!

From the days of film the manufacturers color balanced for white skin, and now things are digital nothing has changed! The filters are made for white people to look good! Often black skin filtered looks aged, washed out or you just become white teeth and eyes! It sucks!

But at long long last a set of filters have been developed for those with melanin skin.

Here’s what Upwrothy wrote abot Tōnr

But all is not lost. Not even close. Because now, there’s Tōnr.

Conceived by product engineers and designers of color for Vox Media’s Hackathon, Tōnr is a new web application with filters that showcase and highlight the richness and beauty of darker complexions.

“I haven’t been lucky when using filters in the common photo apps: they wash me out, add to much contrast, and are generally unflattering,” said Pamela Assogba, full stack engineer at Vox Media and member of the Tōnr team, via email. “I think my skin tone is great, and deserve better treatment, so working on a solution made sense, especially because a lot of people could benefit from it.”

The team of Vox engineers and designers came together for two and a half days of intense work, creating melanin-flattering photo filters using JavaScript and Photoshop.

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“When I first started formulating the filters, I made sure to start with darkest skin first and work my way backwards,” said designer Brittany Holloway-Brown. “It’s important to pay attention to the margins of marginalized communities and to let them know that their faces, their bodies, their thoughts matter. It’s a very small push against the heavy status quo.”

Holloway-Brown researched fashion spreads, photography, and plenty of selfies on social media to see how people of color were lit and portrayed. “My focus was on emphasizing the color, enhancing undertones and heightening the saturation of the skin,” she said via email.

On desktop or mobile, users can apply one of Tōnr’s 12 filters to their photograph.

There’s no upload required, so the photo never leaves your device. Once it’s edited, users can upload their pictures to Instagram for additional edits or share them with their networks as they are.

“Tōnr is an act of love, expression, resistance, and passion because this is an application that tells me and people that look like me that we matter, even if society tends to say different,” said Assogba.

Read more on Upwothy here.