It’s an all-too-familiar scenario. You’ve spent ages getting ready for a night out or special occasion, and you reckon you look just about OK. Maybe even better than that. At least, it looks that way in the mirror in your bedroom. But the next day, when you ask your friends to send over the pictures they were snapping, you’re repulsed by what you receive. In every single photo, your flaws jump out. Your face appears weirdly distorted. Your expressions are, frankly, quite haunting. Even more damning is the fact that your alleged pal has added that they “love this one of you”, in reference to a shot where you look particularly heinous. Are they trolling you? Or do you really resemble the “before” shot in a TV makeover show?
Looking at photos of yourself can be a humbling and horrifying experience. What can make it even worse is the fact that everyone you know seems to look pretty normal when they pose alongside you, as well as their insistence on telling you that, actually, the offending portrait they’ve captured on their iPhone is really nice. Even if your self-esteem generally tends to be pretty solid, and you’re not normally too fussed about appearances, an unflattering picture can put a real dent in your confidence and kick off a spiral of self-loathing. Earlier this week, a meme cropped up on my social media timeline, that summed up the sensation with brutal efficiency, proving this is something of a universal feeling: it was a picture of a grinning woman brandishing a phone, with a caption noting that “someone innocently showing me a picture they took of me” can “ruin my mental health for at least the next three to five business days”.
So why is it so common to recoil when we see ourselves in photos? Our discomfort is rooted in a psychological phenomenon known as the mere-exposure effect, “where people tend to prefer things they see repeatedly”, explains Dr Matt Johnson, a neuroscientist and professor of consumer psychology at Hult International Business School. Since we see our mirror reflection far more often than photos”, Johnson says, “we become more comfortable with it”. So if you’re checking your reflection in the bathroom every morning before you leave the house, you’re likely to get familiar with that particular image of yourself. “You’re normally seeing yourself in the same mirror with the same lighting, the same perspective and angle,” agrees Eloise Skinner, a psychotherapist who has also worked as a commercial model since childhood. “Then when a photo is taken, it can catch you at a moment where you’ve never seen your face or body from that perspective before, so it can be a bit of a disconnect”.
The version of your visage that you see in a mirror has been reversed from front to back, with your facial asymmetries flipped. In a photograph, though, this isn’t the case for the most part (the front camera on your phone tends to be reversed, too, which might explain why you prefer selfies). Instead, it “presents our ‘true’ image, which feels unfamiliar and less attractive due to this lack of exposure”, Johnson adds. We’re simply not used to seeing ourselves in such a way – hence the strange sense of disconnection, that “Oh God, is that really me?” feeling. But because we constantly encounter “true” versions of our friends and family, for example, when we’re spending time with them in real life, they seem to us to look more like themselves in photos.
Just think back to when school photos would get dished out – and everyone else seemed to look completely normal in their portraits, while yours resembled a particularly harrowing Crimewatch photofit. “We see the true image of others more often than any altered version, so we naturally become accustomed to it,” Johnson says. “Unlike with ourselves, we don’t have the same disconnect between their appearance in photos and what we expect.” Rest assured that they probably think they look shocking, though.
Back in the Seventies, a classic psychological experiment explored this particular phenomenon. Researchers asked a group of young women to look at photographs showing their true image and their mirror image. They tended to prefer their mirror image – but when the same photos were shown to their close friends, the friends gravitated towards the true image (with which they’d be more familiar in real life). The study “supports the idea that our discomfort with photos is rooted in our exposure patterns”, Johnson says.
So next time you brandish a particularly horrifying snap in the face of your pal and ask, “Do I really look like that?” don’t cut them out of your life if they reply with a sheepish “Erm, yes?” They’re not trying to shatter your self-confidence. It’s just a matter of familiarity – it might even come from a place of love. “Our brains also tend to process faces we see frequently with more ease, making them appear clearer or more flattering in our perception,” Johnson says. “So while our own photos feel off, images of others tend to align better with how we’ve always seen them.”
Our brains also tend to process faces we see frequently with more ease, making them appear clearer or more flattering in our perception
It seems that we’re not actually all that great at assessing what we really look like (including how good-looking we might be). “In certain contexts and situations, it is common for people to exhibit a psychological phenomenon known as ‘self-enhancement bias’, whereby they overrate their positive characteristics and fail to recognise the difference between their own and others’ perception of themselves,” explains Dr William Van Gordon, associate professor in contemplative psychology at the University of Derby. So some of us might believe we’re just a little bit more stunning than we are. This tendency, he adds, is “link[ed] to our evolutionary development as part of the need to compete for resources and reproductive opportunities”.
In a 2008 study, participants were asked to assess photos of themselves in which their faces had been altered to appear more or less attractive and pinpoint the ones that looked most like them. They ended up gravitating towards – spoiler alert – the prettier versions of themselves. Interestingly, they did the same for a friend’s face, but not the faces of strangers. Inevitably, the consequence of this propensity for self-enhancement is that “when presented with a photo of themselves, people can experience a shortfall in terms of how attractive they look in the photo” versus their gorgeous mental self-portrait, “which results in them disliking the photo”, Van Gordon says.
Can’t relate to this particularly confident strain of self-delusion? Me neither. What might feel more familiar is the “spotlight effect”, another bias that “leads us to believe that others are scrutinising our appearance as much as we do”, as Johnson puts it. This “heightened self-awareness can make us feel overly self-conscious when viewing photos”, he says, but we are probably homing in on our flaws far more than anyone else would do. Put simply – no one is thinking about whether your nose looks weird in the Instagram photo you’ve been tagged in. They’re too busy zooming in on whether their jawline looks puffy, or their teeth seem wonky.
So it seems that our perception of our own attractiveness, and the attractiveness of people we know well, is “often skewed by our emotions and cognitive biases, rather than an objective assessment”, as Johnson says. Our feelings towards others and ourselves come to bear upon what we think we look like. “We would look at a photo of our friends and even if it wasn’t their most flattering angle, we would still be able to see the person that we love,” says Spencer. “We can appreciate them and see no flaws in them because we see them as a holistic person, whereas when we look at ourselves, we’re picking out specific things about the way we look”. In 2021, a study delved into how we form mental pictures of ourselves, asking participants to make computer-generated self-portraits and to answer questions about personality and self-esteem. What they believed about themselves ended up strongly impacting the picture they drew.
Is there a way of getting over our aversion to our photo-selves? Skinner thinks it’s important to acknowledge that there are very, very few people who naturally look good in photos. “Like anything else, I always think [posing for] a good photo is a skill that you can learn – you get better the more you practice,” she says. “Knowing the different expressions you can make and how those appear to you [in photos] … I know it sounds a bit weird, but practicing will drastically improve things.” And – brace yourselves – we also need to properly get to grips with our “true image” through “repeated exposure”, Johnson says, as this will “reduce discomfort over time”. Plus, he adds, being mindful of the biases that we’re affected by, and just trying to be a bit more compassionate to ourselves, can help “encourage a healthier, more balanced self-perception”. The old saying may suggest the camera never lies, but it seems it’s not that simple.
