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While Instagram is a great app for keeping up to date with friends and celebrities alike, you are often likely to be bombarded with the beautifully pristine selfies the people that you follow post. This can lead to an increase in your own insecurities…unless you remember the following things.
A popular feature of Instagram is the vast array of filters available for you to use and make your selfies that little bit more fun. However, it is worth nothing that even the most basic filters – such as the classic dog filter or some virtual sunglasses – are created in such a way that they distort your face. For example, they are made so that they make your skin paler, smoother and heavily airbrushed. This creates the illusion that people don’t have the spots, wrinkles or blemishes that everybody has. They make your eyes bigger, your face narrower, your nose smaller, your teeth whiter: the list is endless. Next time you see a picture-perfect photo of someone online ask yourself; is this what they look like in real life?
Many people will be familiar with the following experience: you’ve just got ready in your room. You’ve put on a spot of makeup or styled your hair and, in your bedroom mirror, under the yellow light in your room, you look fine! You look good even. So you step out feeling great. Then to your horror, you see yourself in more natural light and you’re horrified. You can see every eye bag, spot and you feel bad. This is because different lighting highlights different features in different ways. And selfie sleuths know this! They know where to stand so that the shadows on their face disappear and they look their best. Next time you look at a selfie as yourself; is this person practically tying their body in knots so that their face is in the sunshine coming through the window?
Another common experience we all have is the dreaded accidental opening of the front-facing camera. You wanted to take a picture of your food or your pet and, all of a sudden, you have an up-close view of your double chin and the inside of your nostrils. While anybody would look a little unflattering at this angle, it is nothing to feel bad about. People who take lots of selfies that look great have all worked out that where you hold your phone makes a big difference. They hold the camera so it doesn’t show the bits they don’t want anyone to see. Next time you use Instagram, have a look out for someone who looks like they’ve had arm extensions to make sure that no one sees their double chin (which is completely normal and harmless).
Face tune is the biggest culprit of them all. This app is one step away from being photoshop (another tool used to make pictures seem more polished than they are) and allows people to entirely change the shape of their face to suit expectations. Just because the “bad” parts of people are sneakily erased, doesn’t mean they aren’t there. When you next see a picture of your favourite influencer, have a look for an accidentally erased ear or an extra eyebrow! See for yourself how much treatment selfies go through before the final product.
While it is a fact that we all have insecurities about the way we look and it is only natural to want to hide these things away, it is important to remember that there is no person who doesn’t have spots, slightly uneven eyebrows, dark circles or skin blemishes. Always take what you see online with a pinch of salt because no one is going to show the world the parts of themselves they do not like, but that doesn’t mean that you have to feel insecure about those things too!
