Trend archive · November to December 2022

Lensa Magic Avatars, the AI avatar craze of December 2022

Updated 2026-11-06 · Remake the Trend

Magic Avatars was a paid feature in Lensa, a photo app from Prisma Labs: you uploaded 10 to 20 selfies and, about 20 minutes later, got dozens of portraits of yourself in styles like anime, fantasy and pop art. Added in November 2022, it made Lensa the top free app in Apple's App Store in early December, and set off arguments about how the model pictured women. This is its history; we don't make Lensa avatars.

In brief

When: Feature added November 2022; peaked in early December 2022.
Made with: Lensa by Prisma Labs, running Stable Diffusion.
How: 10 to 20 selfies in, 50 to 200 avatars out, in about 20 minutes.
Cost: From $3.99 for 50 avatars with a subscription; more without one.

What were Lensa Magic Avatars?

Lensa had been a photo-retouching app since 2018. Magic Avatars, added in November 2022, used Stable Diffusion, an open image model, to paint you from your selfies in ten styles that CNBC listed as Fantasy, Fairy Princess, Focus, Pop, Stylish, Anime, Light, Kawaii, Iridescent and Cosmic. The app asked for close-ups of one adult, with varied backgrounds and expressions, and warned of "defects and artifacts" such as extra limbs.

How much did Lensa Magic Avatars cost?

With a Lensa subscription, $3.99 for 50 avatars, $5.99 for 100 and $7.99 for 200, as CNBC reported on 7 December 2022. Without one, AppleInsider listed $7.99 for 50, $11.99 for 100 and $15.99 for 200. The subscription itself came after a 7-day free trial.

What problems did people find?

MIT Technology Review's Melissa Heikkilä generated 100 avatars of herself: 16 were topless and 14 more showed her in very skimpy clothes and sexualised poses, while her male colleagues got astronauts and warriors. The model behind it, Stable Diffusion, was trained on LAION-5B, a huge set of images scraped from the internet, and the article traced the bias to that data. Privacy experts also questioned the app's statement that selfies were deleted once the avatars were ready.

Is Lensa still popular?

Its peak was December 2022. In our view it was the first big "AI selfie pack" trend, the format the AI yearbook trend followed a year later. We don't have current numbers for Lensa, so we don't give any.

What can I make here instead?

One named look at a time, as a video, from one photo, with a free preview still before you pay. The closest here: you as an action figure, in clay, as a living painting or a K-pop idol.