Want to make a body part look bigger in a photo? Put it closer to the camera. It’s all about optics.
Now you can use this information however you’d like, but keep optics in mind when taking selfies, explains a research letter just published in JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery.
What makes selfies different from other photos is that a selfie is a photo that you take of yourself, usually with a digital camera, a tablet, or a smartphone. Unless you have really long arms or friends who have boundary problems, the camera when taking a selfie will typically be closer to your face than when someone else is taking a photo of you.
Therefore, your face may look different in a selfie from real life. A team from Rutgers New Jersey Medical School (Brittany Ward, Max Ward, and Boris Paskhover, MD) and Stanford University (Ohad Fried, PhD) developed a mathematical model utilizing facial dimension data across various genders, ages, races and ethnicities from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. The model then helped determine how much distortion in your nose may occur when it gets closer and closer to the camera.
For example, when the camera is 5 feet or further away, your nose and the rest of your face are effectively the same angle from the camera, meaning that there is no disproportionate enlargement of your nose. However, bring the camera closer so that it is just a foot away and your relative nose size can increase by up to 30% if you are a man and by up to 29% if you are a woman. Of course, your nose doesn’t really increase in size with a selfie (unless you are punching your nose with your camera in the process), but a selfie can make it seem like your nose is larger than it really is.
But why should you care if your nose looks bigger? Well, in a publication in the journal Facial Plastic Surgery, several nose specialists (Erdoğan Özgür, Nuray Bayar Muluk, and Cemal Cingi) from Turkey wondered if the explosion of selfies, webcams, and other nose distorting photo trends are leading to more rhinoplasties, otherwise known as nose jobs. In other words, could selfies be making people overly conscious about their noses? An American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons poll found that more and more facial plastic surgeons (55% in 2017 versus 42% in 2016) are seeing patients whose primary motivation to getting a procedure is to improve their selfie appearance.
However, it’s not completely clear if more people are getting rhinoplasties because of selfies. According to a report from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, the number of nose reshaping procedures actually decreased by 2% in 2017 (218,924) compared to 2016. In fact, in the year 2000, well before people began falling over themselfies, the number of rhinoplasties was 389,155, which is 44% higher than the number in 2017.
Perhaps more people are realizing that perception of nose size and beauty are very subjective and in fact trained by what we see in the media and advertising. Journalist Radhika Sanghani is trying to change that training by launching the hashtag #sideprofileselfie as described by the following tweets:
Breaking the big nose taboo with my new campaign on the #sideprofileselfie!! Let’s stop hating our noses for not being tiny, little snubs and learn to love them by sharing
— Radhika Sanghani (@radhikasanghani) February 20, 2018
The hashtag has motivated a number of attractive people with a wide range of nose sizes and shapes to post profile pictures of themselves. The campaign demonstrates the silliness of focusing a body part when assessing attractiveness. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and not just the nose. If you are obsessing over your nose, you may want to get over your selfie.
