The front facing camera and the third rewriting
Photography made the face evidence. Cinema made it enormous. The phone made it live, editable, and looking back at you while you decide what to do with it.
Front facing cameras existed on mobile phones for video calling before they became instruments of self portraiture, which happened around 2010. They use short focal length lenses at close range, which exaggerates features nearer the lens, principally the nose. Real time filtering, which alters the image before it is captured and while the subject watches, is genuinely new: no earlier technology produced a live edited reflection. Claims about clinical consequences are widely reported but the evidence base is thinner than the coverage suggests.
The camera on the front of a telephone was not put there for self portraits. It was put there for video calling, which is why front cameras appear on handsets in the early 2000s, well before anyone used the word selfie, and why they were initially very low resolution: a video call did not need much. The repurposing happened later, and it happened quickly.
By 2013 the word selfie had been named word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries, which is a useful marker because it dates the point at which the practice became legible to people outside it. Within a decade the front camera had become one of the most used pieces of imaging equipment in human history, and the most consequential thing about it is not the photographs. It is the preview.
The optics, which are not opinion
A front camera has a short focal length, giving a wide field of view so that a face fits in the frame at arm's length. Short focal length combined with short subject distance produces strong perspective effects: features closer to the lens are rendered proportionally larger than features further away.
On a face held about half a metre from the lens, that means the nose, which is the nearest feature, is enlarged relative to the ears and the sides of the face. The effect is geometric and entirely predictable. It is the same reason portrait photographers have traditionally used longer lenses from further back: a longer lens at greater distance compresses the face and produces proportions closer to those seen in ordinary social viewing.
Research in the plastic surgery literature has examined this directly, modelling how selfie distance affects apparent nasal proportions, and the finding is what the geometry predicts. This is one of the few places in this subject where the physical claim is uncontroversial: a phone held at arm's length does not show you the face other people see, and the discrepancy is largest around the nose.
The genuinely new thing
Everything else in this magazine's account of images involves a delay. A negative was retouched after exposure. A print was airbrushed after printing. Film was graded after shooting. Even the mirror returns an unedited reflection.
Real time filtering breaks that. Face tracking software locates facial landmarks many times per second and applies geometric and tonal transformations before the image reaches the screen. The result is an altered image of yourself, moving with you, responding to you, available before any decision to photograph has been taken. It is not a retouched picture. It is an edited mirror.
Whatever one thinks about its effects, that object did not previously exist, and the analogy with retouching understates the difference. A retouched photograph is a claim about how you looked once. A live filter is a continuous proposal about how you could look, presented at the moment you are deciding whether you look acceptable.
A retouched photograph is an argument about the past. A live filter is an argument about the next few seconds.
The clinical claims, handled carefully
A great deal has been written about the effects of all this, and a lot of it is weaker than its confidence suggests. The phrase most often cited is Snapchat dysmorphia, which appeared in a 2018 commentary in a specialist plastic surgery journal describing clinicians' impression that patients were presenting with filtered images of themselves as a reference. It is a viewpoint article naming a phenomenon, not a study measuring one, and it has been cited ever since as though it were the latter.
- The claim
- Studies have proved that using selfie filters causes body dysmorphic disorder, and surgeons report a measured surge in patients asking to look like their filtered photographs.
- Where it appears to come from
- The term Snapchat dysmorphia comes from a short commentary published in a specialist journal in 2018, written by clinicians describing what they were seeing in practice. It was widely reported as a research finding. Surveys of practitioners conducted by professional associations have reported members' impressions of changing patient motivations, and those impressions have been reported as measurements.
- What is actually established
- Established: the 2018 commentary exists and named the phenomenon. Established: front camera optics distort facial proportions in a predictable way. Established: body dysmorphic disorder is a recognised and serious diagnosis with established criteria, which long predates smartphones. Not established: a causal relationship between filter use and the disorder. The published research is largely cross sectional and correlational, sample sizes are often small, and self report of appearance concern is a difficult measure. The reasonable position is that the concern is plausible, the mechanism is arguable and the evidence is not yet strong.
The video call, briefly
One episode deserves a note because it was so widely discussed and so rarely examined. During the period of widespread remote working from 2020, many people spent hours a day looking at a live image of their own face in a small window while talking to others. Practitioners reported an increase in enquiries about facial appearance, and the phenomenon acquired several names in the trade press.
What can be said with confidence is that the situation was unprecedented: no previous communication technology had shown you your own face continuously while you used it. Telephones did not. Letters did not. Meetings did not. The specific complaint people reported, that they had begun noticing asymmetries and movements they had never seen before, is exactly what one would predict from prolonged exposure to a live self image, and it does not require any theory about vanity to explain.
The third rewriting
Set the three technologies side by side and the pattern is clear.
Photography made the face into evidence, and did so through a chemistry that systematically misrepresented complexion. People responded by adjusting the face for the camera, and a whole practice of corrective makeup began.
Cinema made the face enormous and taught an audience to inspect it in detail, under a lighting system whose flattering effects became the target of subsequent cosmetic technique.
The front camera makes the face continuous, editable and self administered. It removes the photographer, the studio, the retoucher and the delay, and hands the entire apparatus, distortions included, to the subject.
What is not clear, and what this magazine declines to pretend is clear, is what that does over a lifetime, because nobody has lived one yet under these conditions. The received wisdom section exists partly for cases like this one, where the temptation to write a confident paragraph about a generation is very strong and the evidence for it does not exist.
Where to look
Readers who want to go further should start with the holdings themselves rather than with summaries of them. The PubMed and the NIST Face Recognition Vendor Test both publish catalogue and research material relevant to this article. Both links are given for reference only. Neither institution has been assessed by us, neither has any connection to this magazine, and nothing here is an endorsement of any organisation.
Questions readers send us
Does a selfie make your nose look bigger?
Yes, in a predictable and purely geometric way. A short focal length lens at close range enlarges whatever is nearest to it relative to what is further away, and on a face at arm's length that is the nose. Portrait photographers use longer lenses at greater distances precisely to avoid this.
When did front facing cameras appear?
On mobile handsets in the early 2000s, provided for video calling rather than self portraiture. Their use for self portraits became widespread around 2010, and the word selfie was named word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries in 2013.
What is Snapchat dysmorphia?
A phrase introduced in a 2018 commentary in a specialist plastic surgery journal, describing clinicians' impression that patients were bringing filtered images of themselves as a reference for what they wanted. It named a phenomenon; it did not measure one, and it is very frequently cited as though it had.
Is there good evidence that filters harm mental health?
The evidence is suggestive rather than strong. Most published work is cross sectional and correlational, sample sizes are often modest, and appearance concern is difficult to measure by self report. The concern is reasonable and the causal case has not been made.
Why do people dislike their appearance on video calls?
Because no previous technology showed you a live image of your own face while you used it. Prolonged exposure to a moving self image surfaces asymmetries and movements that are normally invisible, and a wide lens at close range distorts proportions at the same time.
- PubMed Indexes the plastic surgery and psychiatry literature on selfie optics, appearance concern and body dysmorphic disorder.
- NIST Face Recognition Vendor Test Evaluations of face analysis systems, relevant to the face tracking that underlies live filtering.
- Science Museum Group History of imaging, optics and consumer photographic technology.
- National Science and Media Museum Photographic and moving image technology collections.
- Advertising Standards Authority Rulings on filters and post production in advertising, including social media promotion.
The Gazette, four times a year
One long letter a quarter: what we have been reading, what turned out to be untrue, and what is worth going to see. No selling, because we have nothing to sell you.
Sponsor lineEach issue carries one sponsor line, labelled as such and set apart from the writing. Sponsors are shown the rate card, never the copy. See the rate card.