Why does my photo not look like me?

A phone's front camera is a wide-angle lens, and a selfie is taken from about arm's length or closer. Up close, the parts of your face nearest the lens, the nose and the centre of the face, look bigger, and the ears and the outline of the face look smaller.

A 2018 study in JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery modelled this: in a selfie taken from about 30 cm, the base of the nose looks about 30% wider than in a photo taken from about 1.5 m. Portrait photographers therefore step back and use a longer lens (an 85 mm lens is a common choice), which keeps the face in natural proportion.

Every day you see yourself in a mirror, flipped left to right. Other people see the unflipped face. In a classic 1977 experiment, people preferred the mirror image of their own face, while their friends preferred the true image. Faces are never perfectly symmetrical, so the true image of yourself can feel slightly "off", even though it is exactly how others see you.

Many phones show the front-camera preview as a mirror but save the photo the other way round, which is why a selfie can look fine on screen and strange afterwards.

Overhead ceiling light casts shadows under the eyes and nose; light from a window in front of you evens them out. A face held still for the camera also looks stiffer than the moving face people know.

fotoya.tokyo makes your photo from the one selfie you upload. It changes the setting (background, light, clothes in the business styles) and tries to keep your face as it is. That means it also keeps what is in the selfie: if the selfie was taken very close, the proportions from that distance come through.

It can also get small things wrong: a strand of hair, glasses, a mole, the slight difference between the left and right side of your face. That is why you see a free preview of your own face before paying, and why you get four versions to choose from. If none of them looks like you, try a different selfie before you pay.

• Keep the phone farther away: ask someone to take it from 1–1.5 m with the 2× lens, or use a stand and the timer.
• Hold the camera at eye level, face straight on.
• Face a window for soft, even light; avoid strong overhead light.
• Hair off your face, glasses on only if you want them in the photo.
• Relax your face: take a few shots and pick one where you look like yourself.

• Ward B. et al. "Nasal Distortion in Short-Distance Photographs: The Selfie Effect", JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery, 2018 (PubMed)
• Amestoy A. et al. "Left-Right Facial Orientation of Familiar Faces: Developmental Aspects of the Mere Exposure Hypothesis", Frontiers in Psychology, 2010 (reviews Mita, Dermer & Knight, 1977)
• FD Photo Studio: understanding focal length and how your lens affects portraits