Ever Wondered Why You Look Damn Good In Mirrors But Terrible In Photos??? Here’s Why!!!

Some people nail it every time when it comes to photographs and you probably just wonder why you can’t. You get dressed and look in the mirror, you look amazing but you try to take a selfie and well… you don’t look as good. You must have probably wondered why this is so. In this piece INFORMATION NIGERIA answer these questions and more…

– Mirrors reverse sides. This is know as the mere-exposure effect, which is a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them. Basically we are so familiar with ourselves looking like the way we look in mirrors, we seem to look different in photographs.

– Social psychologist Robert Zajonc — rhymes with “science” — is widely credited with “discovering” the mere exposure effect in the 1960s. We spend considerably more time looking in the mirror and we have become used to seeing our face that way round, so we prefer the way our features look in the mirrored configuration. So when we reverse that image, it doesn’t look right.

– No one has a perfectly symmetrical face. For instance most people part their hair on one side rather than the other or smile slightly more out of one side of their mouth than the other. So if your nose goes 2mm to the left, then when your image is the other way round it appears to be 4mm to the right of where you’re expecting it to be.

– Camera captures our image at a particular object distance and at from different angle view always. While when we look at our image in the mirror, we are looking at it from the perspective of a 5’5 or 5″8 tall person at a desired angle, and also with a larger field of vision such that our whole body is in our sight.

– You must also know that a camera captures our image from the photographers point of view which might distort our image and present us in a way we might not like.

– Photographs are more of an interpretation of an image than a rigorously accurate reproduction of the image. When an image is captured in a photograph many small changes necessarily take place. The simple answer for why this happens is to say that cameras are not perfect and neither are photographic systems such as film or electrophotographic sensors. So in many ways the mirror image is a lot more “Real” than any photograph.

– Also looking at yourself in the mirror provides you with visual feedback, whereas someone taking a photo of you does not. This allows you to make subtle corrections (stand up straight, fix your hair, try different facial expressions, shift your weight, move your face into the light, and a million other things) that all result in a perfect pose. When someone takes your photo, you have no opportunity to react to your own image and pose yourself, and so you end up with however you happened to be positioned.

What do you think???