Selfies Are Making Your Nose Look Bigger, Rutgers Study Finds

NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ — Does this selfie make my nose look too big? Actually, yes.

According to Rutgers University, the way smartphone cameras are designed intentionally distorts some facial features. After a Rutgers plastic surgery professor said he was inundated with patients showing him selfies as reasons for why they needed a nose job, Rutgers partnered with Stanford University to develop a model that shows how selfies distort features.

For example, that's a selfie taken at the left, and a photo of the same subject from five feet away on the right, in an image provided by Rutgers, and used in their study.

Boris Paskhover, an assistant professor at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School’s Department of Otolaryngology (ear, nose and throat) who specializes in facial plastic and reconstructive surgery, frequently was shown selfies as examples of why patients were requesting surgery to make their noses smaller.

“Young adults are constantly taking selfies to post to social media and think those images are representative of how they really look, which can have an impact on their emotional state,” he said. “I want them to realize that when they take a selfie they are in essence looking into a portable funhouse mirror.”

Paskhover worked with Ohad Fried, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Department of Computer Science, to develop a mathematical model that proves to patients that nasal distortion is created by photos taken at close range.

The Rutgers-Stanford model, published in JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery, shows that an average selfie, taken about 12 inches from the face, makes the nasal base appear approximately 30 percent wider and the nasal tip 7 percent wider than if the photograph had been taken at five feet, a standard portrait distance.

The based their model on the average head and facial feature measurements from a selection of racially and ethnically diverse participants. The model determined the magnitude of the distortive effect by presenting the face as a collection of parallel planes perpendicular to the main camera axis. It calculated the changes to the ratio between the nose’s breadth and the width between the two cheekbones at various camera distances.

How selfies drive people’s self-image is a real public health issue, Paskhover said, because it affects people's self-esteem, particularly teens and people in their 20s.

The American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons reports that 55 percent of surgeons say people come to them seeking cosmetic procedures for improved selfies.

All photos provided by Rutgers University