Mirror, Mirror: Obsessing Over the Perfect Selfie
You look for the best light. You hold your hand and arm out at the most humanly awkward angle one could imagine. You suck in your breath all while trying to look cool, calm and together. You tilt your neck just so slightly. If you’re like my friend A*, you brush your fringe a bit and smack your lips together just for good measure. And snap! You’ve just taken a selfie. But no, no, no it doesn’t stop there. See like A*, you’ve mastered the art of the filter. Your filter game is strong! You know that with the tap of a filter, a tweak here, a little crop there – you’ve achieved selfie Nirvana. You post the picture and a few hours later you come across that same image. You notice that you’re fat. Your face looks like you just swallowed a turkey whole. Instead of calming yourself and thinking it was just a bad angle, you start contemplating what surgery you should seek out to slim your mug down. What I’ve just wrote above is becoming all too common of a thing. Social media is now driving people to the surgeon’s chair.
Yes, that’s right, reconstructive surgery for Instagram snaps or a Facebook profile picture. According to a survey conducted by the American Academy of Facial Plastic & Reconstruction Surgery, one in three facial surgeons have reported that they have seen an increase in requests for surgery due to patients self awareness on social media. AAFPRS members surveyed noted a 10 percent increase in rhinoplasty in 2013 over 2012, as well as a 7 percent increase in hair transplants and a 6 percent increase in eyelid surgery. A follow-up study of 2014 data stated that the "surge in self-awareness and an increase in requests for aesthetic procedures (especially in the under 30 set) sired by 'selfies' […] shows no sign of declining."
Then there's the photo editing apps that are made especially to tweak one's face. Reality TV stars and sisters Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner swear by the apps FaceTune and Perfect 365. These apps allow you to smooth, pluck, coif, contour and highlight any part of your face - sometimes til the point you look unrecongizible. View as I play around with Perfect 365 (Free on the iPhone's app store) Let's try it out:
This is my photo uploaded into the Perfect365 app. There's options to give myself perfect skin, remove dark circles and even add blusher and eyeshadow if I so wanted to.
In this photo, I've hid my dark circles that were obvious in the first photo, cleared up my acne breakout on my forehead and evened out my overall complextion.
The before and after. I was able to smooth out my uneven skin tone, my forhead acne is gone and I now I have hazel eyes (yes, there's an option to change your eye color and even play with different hairstyles... I rep team bald proudly however and didn't venture into that part of the app!) To me, I look unrecongizible. Like this does not look like me. I look "pretty". I don't feel as if I look like myself but to take it a step further, I share the photo on social media...
No one said anything about my new look. Instead I got positive feedback from it. One friend says, "Your skin is so beautiful.' Another one jokingly says, "You looking so fine these days!" And the photo recieved over 22 likes.
As someone who has struggled with and still continue to struggle with what I see in the mirror, I could see how these apps that alter your selfie could be so popular. If they garner such beautiful praise as did my new Facebook profile picture, why stop? But then it becomes a quesiton of, "When is enough, enough?" And that's when we start talking bout plastic surgery. The apps resolve a tempoary fix and plastic surgery is seen as the cure-all to a bigger problem...
