Huffington Magazine Issue 80 | Page 60

Exit 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 TECH 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