Selfies have changed our perception of what we look like. Here’s why.

Selfies are ubiquitous in life as we know it. Analysis of millions of photos showed that the number of selfies increased 900 times from 2012 to 2014, according to Flávio Souza et al. in a 2015 paper. That number has likely grown even greater in the years since. You can’t scroll through social media without seeing selfies everywhere. Even LinkedIn, the job platform turned social media site, is flooded with snapshots. There are even regular news stories about people landing in tricky (even deadly) situations because they were taking a selfie. 

These close-up self-portraits have been changing the way we see ourselves. The impact of selfies on self-perception is so prevalent that it has been the topic of many studies and research papers in recent years. The results of those studies tend to be rather alarming, especially when examining certain populations like adolescent girls. So, what’s the deal with selfies? Why has this constant selfie-taking resulted in changed self-perception? As with most things, the answer is complicated and multifaceted. 

Why selfies make us look different

While looking in the mirror used to be our frame of reference for self-perception, selfies are commonly the new mirror. Many of us even use the selfie camera as a mirror to check if there’s food in our teeth or if we have stray hairs. Additionally, for some, selfie-taking happens more frequently than they would look in a mirror. Unfortunately, how we look in the mirror is not how we look in selfies. That’s because, for a few reasons, the selfie cameras on our phones result in a much different image. 

Camera position and perspective distortion

Here’s a comparison of a 24mm lens (roughly the same as a smartphone camera) and a 50mm lens, which is what photographers typically refer to as a “normal” lens.

Stan Horaczek

The primary culprit when it comes to changing your face in a photo is perspective distortion. As you get closer to a subject, the distance between individual elements appears to increase. So, taking a selfie with the camera relatively close to your face will exaggerate the distance between the tip of the nose and the ears. This causes an unnatural appearance.

Telephoto lenses have narrow angle of view, which allows the photographer to stand farther away from their subject while still filling the frame. As a result, these lenses compress what is in the frame, making the distance between elements seem smaller. Wide-angle lenses, though, have a wide angle of view, meaning you need to get closer to your subject to fill the frame. Getting close to your subject will exaggerate the size of the stuff closest to the lens, while everything in the background will appear smaller.

You’ve seen plenty of examples, such as when people pose to make it look like they are holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It also means that when you put a face close to a wide-angle lens to fill the frame, the features closest to the lens will appear much larger than those further away. So, your nose and chin could look absurdly large while your ears get tiny. 

Remember, a selfie camera relies on a wide-angle lens, so you have to have it relatively close to your face to fill the frame. Our arms are only so long; using the telephoto lens on your camera isn’t feasible since you wouldn’t be able to get the camera far enough away to fit all of you in the frame. Because of the wide-angle lens, your facial features will be exaggerated compared to what you are used to seeing in the mirror. But when that’s how you see yourself most frequently, it inevitably changes your perception of yourself, which may not be a positive perception.  

Lens distortion

The image on the right is a crop of the image on the left. You can see that the subject’s face distorts heavily.

Stan Horaczek

One of the easiest explanations for why selfies look different than when we look in the mirror or see a photo taken by someone else is related to lens distortion. There are three main types of lens distortion: Barrel, pincushion, and mustache distortion. A very simplified explanation for this is that distortion happens when light has to take anything but a straight path to reach the image sensor. The stronger the angle the light travels, the stronger the distortion. 

Barrel distortion occurs with wide-angle lenses, making the whole image appear to bow outward from the middle. For example, if you took a photograph of a box with a lens impacted by barrel distortion, the box would look bloated with curved edges. 

So, how does distortion come into play with selfies (or portraits in general)? Barrel distortion results in rather unflattering portraits, as it enlarges and stretches facial features. Pincushion distortion, on the other hand, is seen as a flattering type of distortion as it can make facial features appear smaller and thinner. Unfortunately, when you take a selfie, you’re relying on the wide-angle lens on your camera. As a result, the features closest to the camera are going to be exaggerated.

Distortion is particularly rough around the edges of the frame where the light travels at the steepest angle. The middle of the lens typically doesn’t suffer much distortion, but it gets bad at the edges, so avoid putting people at the edges if you can.

Smartphone and app filters 

While the above factors certainly impact how you look in the photo, the way that photo is processed presents another problem. While we like to believe that a photograph is a truthful, accurate representation, that’s simply not true. It’s especially not true with selfies because of computational photography and filters.

Many apps offer filters that can narrow your face, change the size and shape of your cheeks, make your nose smaller, smooth out your skin, whiten your teeth, enlarge and brighten your eyes, enlarge your mouth, and so much more. While some require you to search out and turn a filter on for these results, other applications may do this automatically, without you realizing it’s happening. Even some phone cameras apply face-modifying filters when taking a photo with the default camera. 

Unfortunately, those filters can have extremely negative effects. When what you see on your phone doesn’t align with what you see in the mirror, it could lead to frustration or confusion. At the far end of the spectrum, there have been reports of body dysmorphia specific to one’s experience with selfies and app filters, a phenomenon occasionally dubbed “Snapchat Dysmorphia.” Body dysmorphia is an “excessive preoccupation with a perceived flaw in appearance, classified on the obsessive-compulsive spectrum,” according to Susruthi Rajanala et al. in their 2018 paper titled “Selfies–Living in the Era of Filtered Photographs.” 

Some are even going so far as to seek out plastic surgery to make their face look like what they see from app filters. The 2019 Annual American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (AAFPRS) survey found that 72% of AAFPRS surgeons reported seeing patients interested in plastic surgery to improve their appearance in selfies. That number has been steadily increasing, having been just 42% in 2015.  

How selfies differ from traditional photography

If you’ve had your photo taken by a photographer or someone with a dedicated camera, you may have noticed that you look differently in those images compared to your selfies. Now that you know how selfie cameras change things, you may be able to gather why traditional photography offers a different perspective. 

First, photographers aren’t limited by the few cameras and lenses built into smartphones, giving them more control over the lens they use. As discussed, lens distortion will impact portraits. Because of this, portrait photographers will typically choose lenses that result in more flattering portraits, meaning they will opt for telephoto lenses with pincushion distortion. 

Photographers also aren’t limited by arm length. It would be a rather uncomfortable portrait session if the photographer was always within arms length of your face, after all. Those telephoto lenses offer an additional benefit beyond lens distortion: More space between them and the subject. That distance also lessens the impacts of perspective distortion, creating even more flattering portraits without the exaggerated features you see in selfie cameras. There are times when opting for a wide-angle is necessary, such as photographing in small spaces, capturing large groups, or for creative reasons, but for the most part, portrait photographers will stay away from wide-angle lenses since they aren’t very flattering. 

The impact of selfies on self-perception

When you continuously see yourself in a particular way, you will inevitably begin to associate that with how you actually look. Selfies produce multiple types of distortion that change your facial features in not very flattering ways. On the flip side, having the option to change those facial features using filters in apps like Instagram and Snapchat can cause even more harm and result in unrealistic expectations for what you look like. At the end of the day, it’s important to remember that the camera does, in fact, lie, and what you see in your selfie, whether filtered or not, is not necessarily how you truly look. 

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