There are a lot of ways to take a picture
of yourself.
But if you look carefully, something's not
quite right about your close-ups.
Selfies can make our faces look weird and
it's changing the way we see ourselves, and
the decisions we make about our facial features.
A lot of people think their nose looks big
in selfies and it's driving them to get nosejobs.
A 2017 poll found that 55% of facial plastic
surgeons saw patients who wanted surgeries
to make them look better in selfies.
That was an increase of 13% from 2016.
But those complaints are often due to a distortion
created by the distance between a camera
and a subject.
This is what a portrait looks like from five
feet away.
And this is what it looks like from one foot
away, about the distance that most people
are taking selfies.
That's a huge difference in facial structures,
especially the nose.
A team of researchers found that taking a
photo from one foot away, makes the base of
the nose look about 30% larger
and the tip look 7% larger, than they would from a further distance.
From five feet away, your features are flattened.
From a foot, your nose is exaggerated.
So the parts of your face that are close to
the camera,
look bigger than they actually are.
It's as if the nose is in the foreground and
the ears are in the background, instead of
being on the same plane.
For now, long arms and selfie sticks are your
best bet.
But phone camera software might one day be
able to alter images with a treatment that
simulates the effect of a distant camera.
Researchers at Princeton created a tool that
can manipulate the position and distance between
a camera and the subject, after the photo
was taken.
So a close-up selfie like this, can be made
to look like it's taken at a more flattering,
natural distance.
It's not perfect, but a version of this technology
could help design the right tool for a forward-facing camera,
one that will make our selfies
feel more like us.
