Reflecting on my Selfie Obsession
Smartphone face, the Zoom effect and the Spice Girls
My husband came back the other day from a school camp, he was only away for a few days but was shocked to see himself in the mirror. Not because he felt he looked haggard, but simply because it has been so long since he had seen his face.
What was life like before mirrors?
When we viewed ourselves by candlelight and the reflection of water?
When we sensed ourselves through touch?
Before television and magnification and camera phones and Zoom and FaceTime?
Now everything is in high definition. As Botox use continues to rise, Dr. Smita Ramanadham has suggested that one of the reasons could be due to the amount of time people spent on Zoom staring at their reflection during the pandemic. I can relate.
During my time as a fitness influencer I would spend hours a week looking at my reflection, obsessing over my muscle definition, colour of skin, pimples, pores, wrinkles, freckles, nose shape, neck lines, jaw, everything! it was a dedicated obsession and it was hyper-inflated by the device in my hands which encouraged me to stare into it to post images for validation and rewatch my stories. If you were to take a deep dive into my phone gallery back then vs now you would see a marked difference.
I set aside a full day for ‘selfies.’ I recall a particularly memorable moment from sometime in 2017 when I called my sister in tears because my mirror had fallen and smashed and now my entire day was ruined lmao. The night before I would shave, tan, and wash my hair. I would apply a full face of make-up and if I hadn’t recently had my eyelash extensions filled in or my eyebrows plucked I would be tempted to wait until I looked ‘just right’.
I explained to my partner, “I have to get these procedures done because my face and body are my brand”. I tried arguing with my tax accountant to write them off (they are a necessary part of the job!) — because I genuinely believed they were. I wonder, what came first? The obsession with my face due to the culture of unrelating beauty standards or the process of social media, the pure act of staring at my face as I hit record, as I rewatched my stories and zoomed in on every flaw. I suspect both influenced each other, but it did make me wonder how different and relaxed life would feel without mirrors.
I used to feel afraid to look at my face. To notice the flaws I perceived; the lines that kept getting deeper around my eyes, the nose that continued to grow and the teeth that become more bucked.
I started dancing in my spare room. I would put on any feel-good song and sing my little heart out, withering all over the floor, gyrating my hips to Tina Turner and Princess Ariel by candlelight. There’s a mirror, a big white one that’s too heavy to be hung by any hook, so it just sits there on the ground covered in dust. Eventually, puffed out and slightly delirious, I sat in front of it. For the first time, watching myself. Not looking for any flaw not seeking anything just watching inside my eyes. And then I saw it. My face started to change. It was hideously grotesque.
Strange-face as it’s called in research terms is a real life phenomenon that occurs by gazing at one’s own face under low illumination. After only one minute of this practice, participants have reported seeing huge deformations, an archetypal face, a monstrous face, the face of a parent or relative and even an animal face. I found the whole process incredibly liberating! To see my face change beyond what I viewed as attractive and acceptable into a face that I considered ugly or monstrous.
Maybe we need to spend less time capturing our selfies and more time staring into the depths of our soul by candlelight?
Last week, Dazed Beauty investigated ‘Smartphone Face’ - the idea that some people look more modern than others; when you watch Dakota Johnson in Persuasion or Timothée Chalamet as King Henry V, there’s something about their faces that makes them look like they have seen a smartphone. We don’t believe that they are actually from that era of time, despite the perfect lighting, intricate sets and costume design.
Is it the white perfect veneers or the smooth glazed forehead that contribute to many actors looking like they know what TikTok is? In 2019, the New York Times tweeted, “Members of the Spice Girls generation are the only people in history to have both grown up with the internet and to retain childhood memories that predate it”. As a fellow member of the Spice Girl era, when I review photos that exist of me as a pre-teen, I have a certain ‘old-school’ look about me.
Back then, disposable cameras were the norm, we’d have one chance to get the shot and when the shot was taken we wouldn’t be able to zoom in and review it after. We lived life in lower definition. That’s not to say that our generation didn’t have our own body issues — Renee Zellweger as Bridget Jones was ridiculed for her weight at 9st 4 (58 kgs) and Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada was described as the ‘smart fat girl’, but life felt simpler back then. I know most millennials breathe a sigh of relief that we missed out on social media in high school.
Mirrors, screens, photos and videos, they all impact us by momentarily removing us from the moment. Maybe that’s what’s different about these photos of me from high school, I’m living life in the moment, there’s no thinking involved in my pose, just an innocence of ‘being’. Are you a fellow millennial too? Pour through your old photo albums and see if you can spot it, the look of somebody who doesn’t know what the internet is.
Zig a zig ah!
Maddy xxx
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