I’ve noticed that the newspapers are increasingly relying on “selfie” photos when they’re reporting on various stories. It must save them a fortune being able to harvest pictures from social media pages operated by the people they’re writing about instead of having to send a reporter out and take an actual photograph.
What bugs me about selfies is that they always involve an identical pose by the immature and socially inept female being written about. It occurred to me that there might be a market for a selfie kit, consisting of some oversized plastic lips and a pair of clip-on doe eyes. The image above is a collection of the first photos which come up when you Google the word “selfies” (just out of interest, you have to scroll quite a way down to find any male selfies).
I don’t use Facebook much (or Twitter – and I don’t use any of the other social networking sites at all), but the fact that I have an account means that I get almost daily spam alerting to me to people “who I might know”. It’s quite spooky that a lot of the time I actually DO know them. And all of the females have their albums plastered with these bloody pictures – every single one of them conforming to the same contrived pose. And none of the ones I know look anything like they do in their selfies.
It was while I was looking for pictures of fake plastic lips pictures and clip-on doe eyes that I discovered someone got in there before me, albeit in a different way – and this might easily explain why so many of these pictures look the same. It turns out you can buy suction devices which are designed to make bigger pouts! One listing on eBay contains no fewer than 20 photos showing such a device, how to use it, and the results you apparently get – including a load of selfies.
It says that you might suffer bruising, which isn’t surprising. Basically, it’s the equivalent of a love bite (or hickey). And you look a complete prat while you’re using it.
It suddenly reminded me of something that happened when I was about six. You used to be able to buy a cough sweet called Zubes which, if my memory is correct, were strange grey-coloured lozenges with black centres (like a sugar pill which had then been sugar coated). I have mixed memories of them tasting bloody horrible, since they contained Aniseed (which I hate), but with an animated TV advert featuring a horse, I think, and the strap line “go suck a Zube”. It seems you can still get them, but they come in a bag now. But back in those days they came in a sturdy round metal tin. One day, and in typical six-year old fashion, I was playing with an empty tin and I remember putting it over my mouth and sucking so that it stuck to my face. Also in typical six-year old fashion, I kept it there for some time. When I eventually released the vacuum I almost shit myself when I saw that my lips were about four times bigger than before. They stayed like that for an hour or two, though I was firmly convinced I was going to look like Mick Jagger forever.
Back then, a selfie – if anyone had been inclined to waste the limited number of potential shots on their roll of film – would have required a trip to the chemists with a Kodak cartridge, and the certain knowledge that 80% of your pictures wouldn’t “come out” when you went to pick them up a week later, because the Instamatic you’d used could only focus on objects between 2 metres and ∞, and those that did would show pretty much everything except your face (blurred thumbs, trees, next door’s cat, and so on).
It’s also worth noting that the standard selfie is taken from a slightly elevated perspective in order to also take in an exaggerated cleavage. There are plenty of well-documented ways of enhancing that part of the body already, so we only need to focus on the lips and eyes part. I am convinced that many selfie poses have been Photoshopped to make the person’s eyes look bigger. It’s so easy to do.
And it’s even easier when you consider that there are dozens of apps out there which are specifically designed to enlarge the eyes in selfie images! Better still, there are apps to enlarge the lips, too. That was something else I discovered while I was writing this.
In a nutshell, it seems that the reason all those selfies look the same is that the idiots posting them actually HAVE taken steps to enlarge their lips and their eyes.