‘SELFIE NOSE’ IS A THING?

Social media can famously distort a person’s view of the world. But that is not all. By calculating that a selfie makes your nose look 30 per cent bigger, an American plastic surgeon has shown that social media selfies even distort a person’s view of their own face.

The unusual research was born of Boris Paskhover’s frustration that his patients were coming in with exaggerated complaints about the unusual size of their noses, and demanding his plastic surgical help.

As proof, they would show him their selfies, pictures they had taken with their phones at a distance of about a foot from their face.

“Your nose doesn’t look big. It’s the selfie. It’s distorting,” he says he tells them. “You look great, I’m looking right at you … A selfie is not accurate.”

It is not uncommon. A poll of American plastic surgeons, for example, indicated nearly half of them had patients who wanted surgery “for improved selfies and pictures on social media platforms.” In some cases, the exaggerated filters on apps like Snapchat, to give their face a cartoonish appearance, have even prompted concerns about dysmorphia, a pathological dislike of one’s appearance.

But some of this was simply misguided and mistaken, said Paskhover, a facial plastic and reconstructive surgeon at Rutgers University. Phones are basically funhouse mirrors that distort reality, noses especially.

“There’s got to be a way to prove it,” he thought.

The result, published Thursday in the journal JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery, is titled Nasal Distortion in Short-Distance Photographs: The Selfie Effect.

“Despite the ease with which selfies are taken, the short distance from the camera causes a distortion of the face owing to projection, most notably an increase in nasal dimensions,” the paper reads.

To measure this effect, Paskhover and colleagues modelled the face as a collection of parallel planes. They needed one variable to remain fixed for reference, and chose “bizygomatic breadth,” which is the distance between the cheekbones. That allowed them to devise a formula that relates bizygomatic breadth to the apparent width of the nose, as the distance from the face to the camera changes.

They calculated three possibilities. The first was a camera at infinite distance, in which there would be no distortion at all. Then they showed that when taken at 12 inches away, “selfies increase nasal size by 30 per cent in males and 29 per cent in females.”

“Importantly, this distortion does not accurately reflect the three-dimensional appearance of the nose,” they concluded.

A normal portrait distance of five feet from the camera resulted in “essentially no difference in perceived size.”

Paskhover explained that the same effect happens when you look in a mirror, but to a lesser degree, because most people don’t look at the mirror from 12 inches away. If they do, their nose looms large.

The effect is not particular to the nose. A side-on shot could amplify the apparent size of the ear, just as a shot from below could amplify the chin, or a shot from above amplify the forehead.

“It’s whatever’s closer to the camera,” Paskhover said.

But the nose is the more common because selfies tend to be face-on shots, and noses are a common and relatively easy target of plastic surgery. Paskhover said that there is probably a potential technical fix, some kind of nose-shrinking filter, but that is beside the point. He said he did the research to raise awareness among young people that their phones are distorting their views of themselves.

“Don’t focus on your phone,” he said. “Relax.”