Exit
up de rigueur, so that every casual
snapshot has the polish of a Vogue
photo shoot. Sebastian Thrun, the
co-founder of Google X, told me in
an interview last year that he imagined technology like Google Glass,
with its ever-present camera, could
push us to share photos that are
“uglier” and “more personal.” But,
a contradictory trend is in motion:
our pictures are getting prettier.
These apps are attractive for the
simple reason that they work. To be
fair, I fall precisely in these apps’
prime demographics — 20-something, female, active online. Yet I’ve
found myself drawn to them much
more quickly than I’d have liked, in
large part because my pictures really do look better. And every other
photo looks worse.
After browsing the FaceTunetweaked portraits on Instagram,
and editing a few of my own, I’m
horrified to see the photos I’ve
shared on Facebook in the past. I
have blotchy skin in one picture,
and I’m too pale in another. Red
eyes! Too-yellow teeth! The selfieenhancers set a new baseline for
photo perfection, and unlike Instagram filters, the face fixing happens
covertly, without any acknowledgment of the digital intervention.
It seems inevitable we’ll face
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HUFFINGTON
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even more fictions from each other
online. But then the high-schooler
from New York tells me a story
about her friends that suggests
there may be a strange authenticity
to our photo fakery as well. She recounts how one of her friends asked
her if another girl had tried to make
herself look skinnier by blurring
her waist in a bikini photo she’d
People are hyperaware
of not wanting to seem fake
in their pictures. As much
as they edit them, it has to
come off as natural.”
uploaded to Facebook. (Indeed, the
girl had.)
“I cringed when I heard that story today,” the 18-year-old told me.
“Her insecurities are exposed.”
In the images where the selfieenhancement isn’t done so carefully, and the cheek is just a tad
off or smile a bit over-stretched,
you learn more about a person
than an unaltered photo ever
could have revealed, and more
than they’d ever want to admit on
social media: In our effort to fix
everything, we reveal what
isn’t going right.