In news that may make your Insta selfie-selecting easier, a team of scientists from the Department of Otolaryngology at Rutgers Medical School and the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University have submitted a research letter to the The Facial Plastic Surgery edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in which they claim taking selfies could warp the way in which we see our own noses.
Spurred on by research explaining that 42 per cent of surgeons see patients looking to undergo cosmetic procedures for better selfies, the team from Rutgers Medical School presented a mathematical model to explain the distorting effects of selfies and show the perceived increase in nose size in selfies versus photos taken from longer distances.
The letter states: "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.
“We modelled the face as a collection of parallel planes that are perpendicular to the main camera axis and calculated nasal breadth to bizygomatic [cheekbone] breadth perceived ratio changes according to the distance from the camera to those planes.”
The team took the average nose, cheekbone, and head measurements from a racially diverse group of males and females, and took two photos – a portrait image from five feet away and a selfie taken from 12 inches away.
"Predictably, an image taken at five feet, a standard portrait distance, results in essentially no difference in perceived size," compared to real-world ratios, said the researchers. "When taken at 12 inches away and keeping the bizygomatic breadth constant, selfies increase nasal size by 30 percent in males and 29 percent in females."
Ultimately, the research found “that photographs taken at shorter distances will increase the perceived ratio of nasal breadth to bizygomatic [cheekbone] breadth… Importantly, this distortion does not accurately reflect the three-dimensional appearance of the nose."
Moral of the story: don’t get disheartened if your nose looks bigger than it is in selfies, it isn’t you, it’s science.
