In Which I Take an Over Abundance of Selfies
My new phone has a front facing camera and back facing camera AND a makeup editing function. It’s a feature on Chinese phones, because in China it’s considerably more acceptable to Photoshop the heck out of your selfies. In addition to have a series of built in filters that rival Instagram, they add makeup to your face.
THUS, my new favorite pastime is taking selfies and putting makeup filters on them to see how silly I’ll look.
1)The eye shadow and lipstick is a bust. (First picture--its hysterical). It doesn’t read as real. However the eyelashes and skin blurring is effective in about half of the pictures.
2) This is a dangerous habit: After looking at pictures 2, 3, and 4 I can almost convince myself that they are real. Yes my skin is alarmingly pore-less, yes I’m paler, and of course the fun fancy-girl-bubble light filter is unrealistic, but I almost feel that the picture still represents me. AND then I look at the original picture, and realize I’m a crazy person. Real people have pores, and under eye cirlces, and fine lines (and I’m only 23 and I’m saying that). BUT my point is that, its very easy to convince yourself that you look like the edited version of yourself, and consequently want all pictures posted online to be overly edited.
While this blatant over editing isn’t as obvious in US selfie culture, it’s is in China and many of the Chinese girls on the Chinese version of Tinder have all of their photos edited like my experiments.
3) The editing software works a lot better if you’re already wearing makeup. In most of the pictures above, I’m wearing makeup. It’s my “I’m-not-wearing-makeup” makeup for work. It’s not perfect, but it evens out my skin a lot and pops my eyelashes. I tried out the filters on a photo of myself with absolutely no makeup one and the filters had some problems. a) It it couldn’t completely cover up my acne, b) It couldn’t find the edges of my eyes.--the eyeliner/eyelashes were all applied to my eyeballs, and c) the blush and lipstick looked extra ridiculous.
4) Taking good looking selfies is hard. The angle of the camera creates a fish-eye effect on my nose, which is not flattering. Tilting the camera up makes my nostrils look super big and my jaw look strange, so I’ve discovered the key to a good selfie is holding the camera above myself at an angle. It keeps my nose looking like a relatively normal size and it creates the illusion that my chin is more narrow and I have a little bit of a heart shaped face (when it is in real life oblong/rectangular). Also, turning the camera side-ways makes the image look different than holding it vertically. This has furthered my realization that I’m incredibly vain and self critical (portrait artist problems) but also that all selfies are somewhat contrived. No one just takes one selfie and is happy with it. We take at least 5 and then are maybe happy with one.
5) This software doesn’t work that well on men. This should be obvious, but I forced Benji to let me take pictures of him in order to try out the feature on his face. It was not as hysterical as I had hoped, but it becomes clear the pore less look doesn’t remotely work for men.
6) I really like close up shots of my eyes. I think they’re naturally really pretty, but also I’m endlessly amused the software’s spotty fake eyelash application. I end up with bottom eyelashes coming out of my eyeballs.
7) WHY DO THE ENDS OF MY HAIR LOOK AUBURN AND THE ROOTS LOOK BROWN? Seriously, do you see that? My roots look straight up brown--no red, almost even a green undertone. And then the bulk of the hair reflects an auburn hue. And HOW does this happen? My hair hasn’t been dyed for 2.5 years!!