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Comment by bongoman37 | Hacker News Reader

The difference between pretty and stunning is a lot of work with makeup, lighting, dressing and so on. I dated a model briefly, she could change from and 8 to a 10 depending on how much effort and time she wanted to put in. This is true for guys too.

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Yeah I think the infamous Jenna Marbles video where she puts on makeup really was the first time it opened my eyes to it. She goes from average or less to amazing in short time.

Link for those who haven't seen it. Can't believe it's been 11 years...

https://youtu.be/OYpwAtnywTk

Tik Tok also automatically edits your appearance with default filters.

And front-facing cameras now come with face-smoothing features right out of the box. I have a Galaxy A51 (2020 phone) and even with the default settings, the FFC photos are much more generous in smoothing out your skin, than the regular rear camera.

Wait what, is this for real? Do phones automatically beautify photos taken with the selfie cam? Why is this legal?! Isn't this a surefire recipe to create a generation of adolescents with insecurity/body issues?

Every time you take a selfie it subtly confronts you with what could be better about you. It's like a fridge that whispers "you're a fatty" every time you open it.

I finally realized it after wondering why I looked 'worse' in photos with friends, when the rear camera is being used to take the picture. That's when I did a rear v front photo comparison.

The face smoothing effect is subtle, but it's definitely there. It's not as extreme as "filters" that can basically change your skin tone and texture.

And it's possible that Samsung does this and not others. My last Samsung phone had this as well, and I usually buy from them.

It's real. In some cases it's turned on by default and some are not https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/digital-wellbeing/m... has some information (not affiliated, just found this a while ago) . I can't find any info right now about apple or samsung or any of the other big vendors.

I think the impact is fairly damaging. I'm surrounded by people with body image issues, and the impact their issues are having on them is heartbreaking.

Sadly when I discuss this with some folks from that industry they pushed me to an academic debate about "well everything is post-processed after the sensor anyway".

There's probably some debate to be had again about whether this is creating issues, exacerbating existing body image issues, or actually just not having any impact one way or another. But I find myself believing that it is both creating and exacerbating.

And for a while I thought these were "first world issues" but many, if not most, of my friends are not part of the "first world" and they still have them.

There's an insidious element present even at the optical hardware level: the limited arms-length distance necessitates wide-angle lenses, which exaggerates the foreground elements and caused an uptick of people thinking their noses were bigger than they "actually" are (at typical viewing distances with our own organic eyeballs) [1]. Perhaps the aggressive smoothing is an attempt to rectify this, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's some automatic computational photography pincushion warping to compensate for the larger-than-reality nose effect.

I sometimes ponder over the alternate timeline where front-facing cameras selfie cams were never invented.

[1] https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/3/1/17059566/pla...

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