Did that selfie make your nose look big? Science says yes, so there’s probably no need for plastic surgery
A selfie taken from 30cm away makes the nose look 30 per cent wider than a photo taken from 1.5 metres away, researchers found
It is the inescapable 21st-century vexation of the vain. Smartphones allow a person to take selfies as fast as the index finger can click, yet from a dismayingly close distance that may leave the subject dissatisfied.
Don’t fret, researchers from Rutgers and Stanford universities say in a new analysis published Thursday. The culprit is distortion.
The researchers undertook the analysis because plastic-surgery patients – who spent more than US$16 billion on cosmetic procedures in 2016, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons – often cited their appearance in selfies as justification for getting a nose job.
Boris Paskhover, an assistant professor at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School’s department of otolaryngology, wanted to set the record straight.
Their findings were published in JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery.
In this social-media-obsessed world, Paskhover, who specialises in facial plastic and reconstructive surgery, is not alone in seeing patients who are unhappy with their selfies.
In a 2017 poll, 55 per cent of surgeons reported they had seen patients who sought plastic surgery in order to look better in selfies, the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons said.
Yet nose jobs, formally called rhinoplasty, appear to be on the wane, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Surgeons performed 218,924 of the procedures in 2017, down 2 per cent from the year before, and down a whopping 44 per cent since 2000.
