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”.
