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Why is confidence confused with cockiness? For years, I was bullied for how awful school photos of me turned out,
like I had any real say in that type of thing! My confidence was so bad that I changed my settings on Facebook so that
when someone attempted to tag me in a photo, good or bad, I had to approve of the tag before it showed up on my
timeline. And out of nowhere, literally, someone posted a photo from their living quarters saying “selfie” and a whole new
world erupted in front of me.
Long gone were the days of bullying once I got to taking and mastering the selfies. In fact, it became almost an
aesthetic for me. My entire family would reference the Madonna song “Vogue” when ever they saw me prepping for a
selfie. It drove my parents mad! If we were out and about and I had an opportunity to take a selfie with the help of perfect
lighting, I wouldn’t hesitate.
The best part about selfies is that I’m in total control. You see me how I want you to see me. A photo is worth a
thousand words and in a selfie I’m screaming “see me in this light!!” both literally and figuratively (we all know natural light
makes for the best photo). I don’t take selfies because I’m the prettiest person on this planet, no. I take selfies because I
can ALMOST be the prettiest person on this planet simply because I have all the control!
Whenever someone brings up how they don't like the way they look in pictures, I can't help but immediately think of the mere-exposure effect. Essentially, the phenomenon is we gradually like things the more we see them and things that are contrary to what we perceive as "normal" we tend to dislike.
ReplyDeleteThroughout your life you have seen your reflection (in windows, bodies of water, mirrors, etc.), but all these reflections are reversed. When you look in a mirror you see an image of you that has had the front and back reversed (not left/right reversal, a common misconception). Eventually we become accustomed to seeing ourselves in this front/back-reversed way. A photograph, on the other hand, captures what you would look like through the human eye. There is no reversal, and this slight difference actually has a pretty big effect on whether we like the way we look or not. Interestingly, people actually tend to like a photo of them better when shown the mirrored version of it (this can be done by simply holding a photo up to a mirror and looking at it through the mirror).
Mere-Exposure Effect: http://psychcentral.com/encyclopedia/2009/mere-exposure-effect/
Mirrored Photograph: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15963384?dopt=AbstractPlus