Why does my face look weird in selfies

Phone cameras and selfies have became very popular nowadays.   However, the phone cameras  distort the face and nose making them wider and longer.   A number of patients before surgery complain that they do not like their noses  in their photos.  Also, some patient after rhinoplasty  complain that their noses still looks wide  or long in the photos taken with phone cameras.

This problem has become so common that some  surgeons conducted a study and found that the nose appeared about  30 % wider and the tip of the nose 7 % wider than real life images when photos were taken up close.   This study was published in  JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery.

So, it is very important to understand this  distortion and learn how to analyze rhinoplasty results and how to take facial photographs  to produce  as close to real life images as possible.

The lens on phone  cameras is too short for facial photography.  Taking face photos with short lens cameras and up close  results in the whole face, nose, and eyes  appearing  wider and face and nose longer than in real life. This facial widening distortion  also causes  the ears to disappear on the photographs.  Additionally, any nasal asymmetry maybe exaggerated due to stretching.   If you are using a small camera or phone camera, you need to step back 5 feet and zoom in to diminish this stretching effect. However, it is best to use a DSLR camera with a 50mm lens (total focal length of 85mm) to get a real life image (without stretching), which is what is recommended for facial photography and what  I use in my office to take before and after photos.

If you do not see your ears on your photo as much as you do in real life, then  your nose/ face are stretched by the camera. 

Example 1:

The image on the left (85mm) results in no distortion and ears show.   The images on the right taken with a short lens camera up close show the face and nose  wider/longer and ears not showing.

Example 2.

Photos taken up close. The image on the left is stretched. The nose is wider, face wider, and ears do not show.

Example 3.

Short lens camera (18mm) stretched the face and nose making the face/nose appear wider and longer.    A photo taken with a  55mm lens produce a real life image without the stretching effect.

Example 4.

Example 5.

A selfie that clearly shows a stretched face. The nose and face are wide,  the distance between the eyes is wide and ears disappeared.  This type of artificial facial and nasal stretching  may cause anxiety and sometimes depression in patients  undergoing rhinoplasty.

So, it is best to take photos using a SLR camera with a 50mm lens.  If using a phone camera,  have the person taking photos step back 5-6 feet and zoom in to minimize facial stretching.  Furthermore,  photos should be taken in well illuminated conditions without shadows and without the use of flash.

This this an example of a photo taken in my office.

Three years after closed rhinoplasty. Nearly all swelling has subsided showing true midnasal narrowing and tip definition.

The photo was taken with a Nikon SLR  (55mm lens with a total focal length of 85mm).  These photos show no facial stretching and ears show as much as in real life.  There are no shadows on the face and nose and no flash was used.

These images show as close to real life look as possible and these types of images should be used to analyse surgical results.

It’s a fraught thing, selfie-taking. One moment you’re thinking of yourself as more or less human-looking, and then—click—you realize you’ve got it all wrong, and that strangers on the street probably pity you, on account of your dead eyes and strange head. Or you see, on your phone, a perfectly normal-looking person who just happens not to resemble you in any way. Mirrors are much friendlier in this regard: you tend to know what you’re getting. To figure out why you don’t, with selfies—why, so often, the selfies look so weird—for this week’s Giz Asks we reached out to a number of experts in psychology and digital photography.

Associate Professor, Photography, Palomar College

Selfies are usually taken with wide-angle lenses, which expand space, distorting the image to get everything in. This works great for landscapes, but not so much for faces—you wind up with a bigger nose, or a bigger forehead. This is why selfies are often taken with arms extended as far out as they can possibly get, or with selfie sticks—the closer the camera is to your face, the more pronounced that distorting effect is. Distance minimizes it, but the distorting effect is still there, and it makes our faces look unfamiliar, which can be disturbing.

Then there’s the fact that people, when they’re looking at pictures of themselves, are often highly attuned to their flaws. They look at the things they don’t like, rather than seeing themselves as someone else might.

Lighting is also important. Most Instagram influences have a good intuitive lighting sense, because they’re walking around constantly with their camera seeing what looks good. But there’s actually kind of a science to it. You should be looking for soft, diffused light. This is why photographers use big softboxes—diffused light minimizes texture and volume, and hard light emphasizes it. Texture and volume, on a face, means wrinkles and zits and pores. Which is why when people pull out their camera on a sunny day at the beach, the results are often a disaster—you’ve got hard direct light and a wide-angle lens and all you can see is the mole on your cheek.

Lecturer, Photography, School of Art + Design at Illinois

A selfie is a fantasy of your spectral image in the eyes of another. Basically, your selfies may look weird because when you’re looking at a selfie you aren’t just looking at yourself, you are looking at yourself looking at yourself. This engages with the uncanny because this selfie gives you access to our own double. It allows you to see a version of yourself that is usually reserved for other people, the un-reversed “real” self.

The compulsion to see yourself the way that other people see you is the definition of vanity. Social factors inform how images look as much as the limitations of the technological apparatuses that produce them. Nobody wants to be caught taking a selfie. It is vain, and vanity is embarrassing. Social disdain for vanity pushes selfie-making into the sphere of guilty pleasure (a soft phrase for taboo) which makes it in turn, more desirable. So, the looming Spector of taboo makes looking at selfies feel “off” insofar as it makes looking at the images feel naughty. This way selfies become great compulsions. Personally, I have 7,937 selfies sitting in my iCloud that are effectively useless space-wasters, though that space is negligible since the front-facing sensor for my iPhone 6s only produces a 1mb file. So my colossal archive of existence affirmations only amounts to a puny 8gb of data.

The photo community often engages in a dichotomizing conversation about what distinguishes a selfie from a self-portrait. I have heard folks wax poetic about intent and how one belongs in the art world and one belongs in the real world. I don’t find that discussion particularly productive. A selfie is a subsect of self-portraiture in which the subject is physically holding the camera in their hand while the shutter is depressed. This means that whatever ends up in the frame is limited by the length of the limb one is holding the camera with (usually their hand, sometimes their feet if they’re flexible enough.)

I am talking about psychology and social influence more than the actual technological aspects of one’s phone camera because visual perception is enormously informed by imagination, and imagination is an amalgamation of physio-psycho-social factors. I think the most interesting answer to this question isn’t about the distortion from the wide-angle lens on your front facing camera, or the color space that your screen reproduces the pixel data in, or the image reversal some companies build into their software, but how do selfies function in your life.

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Artist, and Associate Professor of Art at Arizona State University

There’s just so much pressure with selfies, assuming we’re talking about something shot with a smartphone with the intention of being shared on social media. Social media is so aspirational, in a way, and even when it’s negative it’s positive, in terms of projecting something about yourself that’s desirable—even if it’s repellant, it’s desirable-repellant. I think that pressure makes it hard to feel satisfied. We keep taking more of them because we want to get better at it. They’re so aspirational that we can never achieve a great one, so we have to keep taking more. Meanwhile, the conventions keep shifting, and the filters and tools keep getting better, or just more complicated.

I think our current isolation has only intensified this pressure—social media is the way we see each other. I think people are either engaging with it more or totally shutting out of it. The more isolated we are, the more it becomes like our sole form of being in the world, the more pressure there is. We want to keep looking better, getting better, being more desirable, promoting ourselves as humans, promoting ourselves as business entities, getting more people to love us, etc.

That said, the weirder the better, I would say, because there’s so many conventions to selfies now—we know that we’re supposed to cock our head a certain way, hold the camera at a certain angle to look good, and then we have FaceTune and all these other things. So I think when they look weird they’re actually maybe a little bit authentic.

Professor, Psychology, Washington State University

Unlike more traditional photos, selfies often involve awkward angles or centering, and the person taking the photo may be attending to different things (the angle, the camera on the device, other things in the environment). So, selfies are not particularly natural in the way that we think of our image or of traditional photos. Some of my research also indicates that people who post selfies on Instagram are viewed less favorably than those who post more traditional posed photos. One of our theories on this is that selfies seem more contrived and less natural in the eye of the beholder, too.

Why is my face distorted in selfies?

The lens on phone cameras is too short for facial photography. Taking face photos with short lens cameras and up close results in the whole face, nose, and eyes appearing wider and face and nose longer than in real life. This facial widening distortion also causes the ears to disappear on the photographs.

Why does my face look weird in the camera?

The camera lens is not the human eye It's called lens distortion and it can render your nose, eyes, hips, head, chest, thighs and all the rest of it marginally bigger, smaller, wider or narrower than they really are.

Why do selfies sometimes look weird?

Blame your brain instead. Selfies sometimes look strange to their subjects because of how we see ourselves in the mirror, how we perceive our own attractiveness, and the technical details of how we take them on camera phones. Whether or not a selfie is reversed after being shot is a major factor.

Why do I look uglier in pictures?

This simply means that photos tend to flatten your features or distort them due to certain angles. Also, since photos store everything, any awkward movement which goes unnoticed in real life is captured for everyone to see.