What Lets You See Your Real Self: Pictures or Mirrors?
Neither is very accurate.
A mirror shows a reversed image of your face, and our faces are subtly asymmetrical. Therefore, a mirror image will always look slightly different from how we appear to other people - in that regard a photo is more accurate.
Selfies are taken from close up, and the cameras on devices like phones often have a distorting effect, like a fish-eye lens, to enable them to take in a whole scene more easily. That means object close to the camera (including your face, especially nose and forehead) tend to be magnified. If you use flash that makes selfies more unflattering still, by using a harsh cold light which makes skin look bleached and shiny, shows every blemish in sharpened detail and causes you to flinch when the picture is taken.
If you want a more accurate view, the way other people see you, try using two mirrors, so your reflection is reversed and therefore correct.
This just leaves out one other factor - other people’s perception. If you talk to several people about how someone looks, you will usually get slightly different answers. That’s because beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. When people look at another person’s face, the details they take in, the features that look prominent to them, and which look plain or attractive, are highly subjective. Our brains are conditioned to read faces like a book, looking for details of expression, and features which are familiar, meaningful or which have good or bad associations. Therefore, when you judge someone’s appearance, you are always seeing it through a filter of your own memories, experiences and ideals, which is even affected by your knowledge of your own face and those of your close family.
The other thing that’s left out of photos and usually not even seen in the mirror is your demeanor - your energy, your expressions as you talk or look at people. That’s really important in how people see you. Don’t be depressed, you may never see yourself the way other people see you!
What we see in a mirror is left-right swapped (well, actually, that’s not true - it’s front-back swapped - but that’s an answer to a different question!)…what’s in a selfie isn’t.
So what you see in a photograph of yourself is how other people see you.
Most people think photographs of themselves don’t look “right” - but that is because most of us have grown up looking at ourselves predominantly in the bathroom mirror.
So we’ve grown used to a left/right (front/back) swapped view of ourselves and that has become our own “self-image” - so when the reversal is corrected, we think it’s weird.
HOWEVER - as cellphones and ‘selfies’ become more common - perhaps a new generation of people will grow up seeing themselves more often in selfies than in the mirror and THAT will become our normal “self-image”.
It’s interesting to note that when you take a selfie - many cameras deliberately do a left-right swap of the image to make it seem to you as if you’re looking in a mirror…while other offer the option to mirror the image or not.
So, yes - in a sense, a selfie image is a more accurate image than a mirror.
