I realize there are actual important things that need thinking about, but my brain has been stuck on this for a few days.
Occasionally I prepare for my day and feel like I’ve gotten it kind of right. My hair looks how I meant it to, I remembered to put on lipstick and it happened on a day when I like what I’m wearing. It’s rare enough that when it happened most recently I asked my son to take a picture. Seconds later I asked him to delete it. My skin looked blotchy and my hair was a fright. I’ve heard “the camera adds ten pounds” but is that all cameras, or just TV/Moivie cameras? Does it also add frizz? What gives?
One night earlier this week I struggled with something irritating my left eye. I rubbed and rubbed it all evening. The next morning in the mirror I looked as if I’d lost a prize fight. dark dark circles under both eyes and the area around the left one was swollen and blotchy. I had to rush through my ablutions to make a 9:00 meeting. I wash my hair every other day and this was a not wash day. When I’m not in a rush I add some product and try to subdue it. This was more of a shrug and “it’ll have to do” sort of day. The woman I was meeting said (I believe sincerely - she wasn’t selling me anything and has nothing to gain from flattering me) “I can’t get over how pretty you look today!” (In a way that to me implied that I looked kind of ragged at our last meeting)
I think it’s all a matter of what you’re used to. I have a friend that I think is very attractive. Then one day I saw her in a mirror, and yikes! She just seemed… deformed.
This is a BIG part of it. Nobody’s face is perfectly symmetrical. What you see in the mirror is reversed for everyone else, and in photos. So photos of you are going to look weird to you, maybe to the point that you barely recognize yourself. To others, they look normal.
Regarding cameras, there’s a certain amount of physics involved there. Remember that your vision with eyes in real life is binocular – you have two eyes, the two visual fields overlap and merge and that gives you depth perception.
A camera has only one “eye.” Its depth perception is going to be distorted, especially when the lens is wider or narrower angle than your normal visual field. Instead of seeing part of what’s on the “side” of an object (or a person), that “side” will be flattened out to the “front” (that is, it’s not round with depth, it’s flat), which will make it look wider and flatter than it is.
That is, perhaps, more nerdy than you were looking for…
I know a bartender for a long time that I’ll stop for a beer a couple of times a year now, but regularly before twenty years ago. Very pretty. Would never let anyone take a picture, saying they always came out horrible. I was a very early adopter of digital cameras, a pretty good photographer and PhotoShop user. I really didn’t believe that she just couldn’t look good in a photo and convinced her to let me try. She knew and trusted me well enough to delete the pics if they were not good. I took a few pics, a few different times and sure enough, this very pretty person looked no better than average no matter what I did.
Maybe a very good professional photographer could manage it, but she was more correct than I.
I look decent in about 15% of the photos that are taken of me, when I have my neck stretched out just right and my hair isn’t stringy/greasy from the Houston humidity and my natural oils, and my eyes aren’t half closed like they almost always are, and I have a decent smile which is really hard for me to manage.
In the mirror? I’m always one hell of a handsome fellow
I can look in the mirror, like what I see (as good as I get) and then I’ve taken a photo using my phone … the photos are hideous! I look like a freak. I look back in the mirror - still my face looking back at me. I take a photo of the face in the mirror and no matter how many times I take a picture from different angles etc, I look awful and hate the outcome.
It’s not just about getting a photo taken when you blink - there seems to be the lack of animation in my face in the photo that sucks any “good” aspects out of the image.
