A plea against mirrored selfies

Also available in German: 🇩🇪 Plädoyer gegen gespiegelte Selfies | Chinese: 🇹🇼 拜託，別再發鏡像自拍了

There are subjects which may be objectively trivial and yet always triggers a little burst of irritation in me – every single time. Mirrored selfies are one of them. This column is an attempt to investigate the problem a little bit.

You take a photograph using the front-facing camera of your pocket telecommunications computer.

All text in the picture is backwards. On T-shirts, on signs in the background, everywhere.

How did this happen?

Most mobile operating systems – or rather, their camera apps – now save selfies by default exactly as you see yourself in the viewfinder or in a mirror: mirrored, front to back.

To you, this may feel “right”, because you normally know your own face mostly (or only) from the mirror as well, aka in reverse.

For everyone else, however, that mirrored look simply looks unfamiliar.

They know your face as it actually appears in real life: not as a mirrored image.

A mirrored selfie therefore looks slightly odd to its intended audience – that is, to the people with whom you are sharing it. In much the same way as a friend standing beside you in front of a mirror can suddenly look strange and asymmetrical to you.

Human faces are naturally asymmetrical. But we only notice that asymmetry strongly when we see a familiar person reflected in a mirror. Here is an example:

Anyone who knows me should be able to answer this: which one is the real Tom? Left image or right image?

And yet people now force their mirrored selfies upon the rest of us. Faces, hair growth, text, logos, clothing – everything is reversed, everything is wrong.

The automatic mirror option is a disease of selfie photography. It perverts what photography once attempted to provide: a reasonably faithful image of reality at a particular moment. Instead, it has become a service rendered to the vanity of the user.

At some point, some focus-group study must have discovered in an A/B test that people rate their selfies more favourably when the images are mirrored. After all, that is how they know themselves from their own reflection.

This belongs to the same continuum as skin smoothing, beauty filters and Studio Ghibli-“inspired” avatars extruded from the AI machine. Ultimately, it leads to the complete distortion of reality.

That this turns the original purpose of photography into an absurdity: granted. That people post such pictures without even noticing that every word in them is backwards: troubling.

So here is my plea: switch off the mirroring function of your front-facing camera. Open the settings of your camera app and disable the option that saves mirrored selfies. Example screenshot:

You may find your own face slightly unfamiliar for a day or two. Everyone else, however, will see you exactly as they already know you. And, as an added bonus, they will finally be able to read what is written on your stupid T-shirt.

Better still, do not use the front-facing camera at all. Turn the phone around, look into the actual lens and take the picture using the volume button on the side.

That also avoids the vain, unmistakable selfie gaze directed not at the lens but at your own eyes on the screen – the look that immediately exposes every selfie as a minor exercise in fakery.