Instagram’s working on a new option to help users celebrate their birthday, with a special birthday photo effect that would be visible on your profile for the day.

As you can see in these screenshots, shared by app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi, the new process would enable you to add a birthday effect to your profile image, which would let others know that you’re celebrating – and provide similar function to how we’ve all outsourced our birthday reminders to Facebook.

Which is maybe the point. As Facebook becomes less popular with younger users, Meta may be looking to maintain that functionality across another app, while also adding another reason for more interaction and engagement.

And Instagram already has your birthday info, as it made all users enter their birthdate back in 2021, as part of a push to stop underage users from accessing the app.

It makes sense, then, to add it in, which could expand the utility of the platform, while also providing another way for IG to showcase its visual effects tools.

And people do like birthday celebration tools. That was made evident recently, amid backlash to Twitter seemingly removing its birthday balloons feature – which it hadn’t actually removed, but was inactive for a period due to a back-end error.

So, maybe it’s a thing, and maybe it can help Instagram boost interaction, and provide an additional spark of joy in the app.