Selfies are everywhere. They’re part of how we present ourselves, how we communicate — and increasingly, how we think about our appearance. And that isn’t always a positive thing.
Why selfies can make your nose look bigger
It’s not you. Selfies distort your face.
Christophe Haubursin was a senior producer for the Vox video team. Since joining the team in 2016, he has produced for Vox’s YouTube channel and Emmy-nominated shows Glad You Asked and Explained.
More and more, concerns about appearance in selfies are driving people to get nose jobs. In a poll by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, 55 percent of facial plastic surgeons reported seeing patients who wanted surgeries to help them look better in selfies. That was an increase of 13 percent from the previous year.
But those concerns are often the result of a camera illusion that occurs when a photo is taken extremely close to a subject. Researchers from Rutgers University and Stanford University demonstrated that effect in a paper published in the journal JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery. They found that the nose looks about 30 percent larger at one foot away than it does from five feet away:
JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery
For anyone who’s taken a selfie before, that’s not entirely surprising. But researchers at Princeton created a tool that could fix that, by altering the apparent distance and position of camera and subject after the photo is taken. It’s a pretty uncanny effect (you can try it out for yourself), but it could prove to be an important technology in creating a forward-facing camera for pictures that feel more like us.
Watch the video above to see how this visual illusion distorts the way your face looks in selfies. You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. Subscribe for the latest.
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