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what you get. Even as people use
Snapchat to share silly photos that,
crucially, disappear after a few seconds, those same social media users are delighting in new ways to
edit their lives and present an evermore perfected, artificial image of
their world. We’re hungry for ways
to exert more control over our images, not less. And who’s to blame
us? The rise of selfie-help represents a new way for people to cope
with the relentless judgment of the
web and the pressure to disclose
more online. It also hints at the
start of an airbrushing arms race
that could make impossibly attractive photos the norm.
“There’s definitely more pressure
to have a better version of yourself
or put your best foot forward,” said
Caroline Tien-Spalding, director
of consumer marketing at ArcSoft,
Perfect365’s parent company. “You
don’t know how long that photo is
going to live or how long the impression that you’re putting out
there will last.”
While selfies have lost their
stigma, these selfie-help apps are
still taboo. Just 50,000 Instagram
photos have been tagged #Perfect365 — mostly people playing
with the app’s makeup filters for
dramatic effect — but the app has
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HUFFINGTON
12.22.13
been downloaded 17 million times
since its launch two years ago.
People’s reluctance to acknowledge
the handiwork of their digital dermatologists hasn’t much hampered
the success of this type of app:
ModiFace’s suite of about 20 editing apps have been installed nearly
27 million times, and FaceTune,
since its debut this past March,
has topped Apple’s rankings as the
most popular paid app in 69 countries, including the U.S.
These selfie-enhancers skew toward teens and 20-somethings,
Perfect365, a free app
that lets people instantly
smooth skin, excise zits,
highlight eyes and even resize
noses before sending their
image out on the Internet.”
who are highly active on social
media, and are also overwhelmingly female. Seventy percent of the
users of FaceTune, which its creators, perhaps naively, thought was
“gender neutral,” are female. And
two-thirds of Perfect365’s users are
under 24 years old.
The pictures end up on dating
profiles, Instagram, Facebook or
even Christmas cards. (The chief
executive of ModiFace said there’s
always a bump in downloads