Although selfies are today a global phenomenon – a 2014 Google report already estimated that 93 million of them were taken every day by Android phone users – taking photos of ourselves is not new. It is believed that an American businessman named Robert Cornelius took the first of these self-portraits in October or November 1839. However, today, this photographic modality is part of the daily lives of many people and, in fact, it has become in the object of study of different research groups.
Thus, a team of cosmetic surgery experts from the Department of Otolaryngology at Rutgers School of Medicine, New Jersey, and the Department of Computational Sciences at Stanford University, recently published an essay in the journal JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery in the They come to confirm what many users already suspected: that our features are distorted in many selfies. These scientists warn that, for example, we do not have as big a nose as it appears in most of them.
The key, it seems, is the distance at which the camera is located . Images taken very close to the face tend to alter the proportions of facial features. “If the camera is close to a prominent element, such as the nose, everything around it will appear larger in relation to the rest of the face,” said Boris Paskhover, one of the study’s co-authors, in a statement. he works as a plastic surgeon at the aforementioned institution in New Jersey.
Better, with a stick
Pashkover and his colleagues have calculated that photos taken from about 12 inches away increase the apparent size of the nose by 30% for men and 29% for women. In these snapshots, the tip of this organ also appears 7% larger compared to the rest of it than it actually is. In contrast, an image of the face taken at about a meter and a half reflects practically the same proportions that are seen with the naked eye. For this reason, selfie sticks allow you to take more natural shots .
To determine this, these researchers used the measures of different traits of a large number of people conserved in a database to which they applied a mathematical model. “The problem is that many users, especially young people who constantly take selfies and share them on social networks, think that these images are a faithful representation of themselves, which can end up affecting them emotionally,” says Paskhover.
And it is that one thing is what our selfies seem to us and quite another what others think. In a study published in 2016 in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science , a group of researchers from the University of Toronto, in Canada, already pointed out that the authors of self-portraits see themselves more attractive and interesting in them than in the photos of other people.
Reference: Nasal Distortion in Short-Distance Photographs: The Selfie Effect . Brittany Ward, BS et al. JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery (2018) . Doi: 10.1001 / jamafacial.2018.0009
