The Real Reason You Can't Stand the Way You Look in Photos Revealed

People can be pretty private about the pictures on their phones. It's so much easier to take a plethora of pics and just let them sit there until we get a notification about our memory being low, than it is to spend the time to delete the ones we don't want, or that we no longer need.

So if someone gets a hold of your phone, you might be quick to grab it from them before they take a look at your camera library. Besides nude pics, which is a whole other story in itself, another popular style is the "selfie," and one guy was shocked to find out just how many his friend had taken when he was put in this position.

"My friend was showing me something on her phone when she committed a cardinal sin: She slipped up and accidentally let me glimpse her camera roll," Elite Daily's Dan Scotti began. "For the most part, I wasn’t overly shocked. There were a few photos of above-average-looking salads — you know, the type that you think you could make if you didn’t lack the ambition — a couple shots of her infant nephew, a picture of her dog and then something astonishing (and, no, I’m not referring to any nudes).

I kid you not, loyal reader: At the bottom of her camera roll, there were about 50 selfies."

What Dan found was not a variety of selfies showing a cool place his friend was at, but the classic selfies that seem to be totally, utterly, entirely self-involved. You know ... the duck faces with specific lighting and a blank stare.

"I asked her why the f*ck 50-plus photos of herself would ever be necessary. I mean, I figured she couldn’t be that narcissistic, could she? Her answer revealed quite the contrary."

Dan's friend replied with, “Oh, don’t look at those. I didn’t look good in any of those.” And despite the fact that she appeared to look fine in every single one of them, she still said, “I hate how I look in pictures!” And that was when Dan understood, because he, too, hates the way he looks in pictures.

"This is why I try to avoid any social gatherings that might involve pictures (that’s what I tell ‘em, anyway). It’s not like I’ve ever taken a photo in my life and been like, 'Yeah, you know what, I think I might just hang that one up on the fridge.' It’s usually more along the lines of, 'Why haven’t I gotten the hang of this the smiling thing yet, and why the f*ck does my skin look that shade of green (the downside of having olive skin in the winter months)?'" Dan explained.

What's the deal with everyone hating how they look in pictures? Nick Stockton of Wired explains that it has to do with mirrors. See, when we look at ourselves in the mirror, we're actually viewing a mirror image of ourselves, not the real deal. What we see is an inverse image. We like "mere-exposure," meaning we like to see what we're used to seeing and pictures don't reflect that.

The concept of mere-exposure was developed by Robert Zajonc in the late 1960s. If the law states that we react positively to things we often see, then pictures wouldn't fit the bill.

So it's not necessarily that we think we're ugly in pictures, it's just that we're not used to seeing it, so we shy away from it.

Do you find that you often take several selfies because you can't stand the way you look in the first one?

Source: Elite Daily