Why we always find ourselves ugly in photos

Say friend, how many selfies are on your phone? Honestly? A hundred? Five hundred? Fifteen hundred? The perfect selfie is a full-time job in itself. Where your love says you look incredibly handsome, you wonder if you need a new pair of glasses. What other people find beautiful, we often find anything but perfect ourselves. Your nose is three times as big, those wrinkles between your eyes weren't there this morning at all, and you suddenly look five kilos heavier than you actually are. What is the reason that we sometimes think we look quite decent, while we don't see this in photos? Got a moment?

1. Psychologists have the perfect term for it: self-overestimation. Research shows that we sometimes rate ourselves a bit on the high (or handsome, therefore) side. If you have to blindly choose from a series of photos, the chance is quite high that you choose an edited photo of yourself.

2. You get used to your own face in the mirror, also known as the ‘mere-exposure effect’. This means that the more often you see something, the more positive you become about it. And this applies not only to your own image. How often does it happen that you play a song that you initially turned off as quickly as possible, suddenly at volume ten? Because you see yourself often enough in the mirror, you start to like what you see more and more. However, we always see ourselves in mirror image, which makes us think we look different than we actually do. When you then see yourself in a photo, we suddenly find ourselves a lot less attractive.

So friend, you know what you need to do. Take a photo of yourself a bit more often instead of dancing in front of the mirror. Without a filter, okay, that at least.