Selfie culture has been something my culture has grown up with with the evolution of social media always being at our fingertips the possibilities are endless. One thing I have noticed growing up through this digital age has been the self obsession of looking perfect all the time. The need to look good to be treated good is at its all time highest and the negative side effects of this self judge will only become more prevalent over time. Selfies are the self portraits taken by you, these pictures will either live in your camera roll forever or will be posted online for all the socials.
But let’s go back in time and take a deeper look at where the selfie came to be. The first recorded selfie was taken in 1839 by Robert Cornelius where he was able to take part in this phenomenon by using the method of daguerreotype to take this photo. Furthermore, the first mirror selfie was taken on a kodak black by the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolavena in 1914. Now let’s jump to when the word was first coined, in 2002 on the ABC forums after a post made by an Australian man named Hopey. Now just to 2013 when the word was added to oxford dictionary and officially became a word.
Now we live in a world where selfies are just part of the everyday norm but with this new norm. But my question was does taking selfies affect your mental health and did the popularity of selfies change the beauty standard we live in today. With a simple google search you would find yes selfies did affect the beauty standard and it can affect your mental health. But the real question is why? Selfies and social media have basically become a synonym at this point so there is no shocker the fact social media is bad for your mental health that selfies follow the same rule. With my research I have found that many medical professionals believe taking too many selfies can lead to major mental health problems. The American Psychiatric Association actually confirmed that taking selfies is a mental disorder and even went as far as to term the condition “Selfitis”. With this information this addiction has led to many more mental health issues as in the extreme case people would face digital narcissism, body dysmorphia, psychosis. Now, yes if you take one selfie you won’t be facing these issues but in the extreme cases over time doctors have found that people with mass amounts of phone usage, overconsumption of social media, and just the process of taking too many selfies could be the issues a person may face. On average the normal teenager will take around 8 selfies a day this equals around 2000 to 3000 per year and to take in note that they take about 16 minutes to just get one “good” selfie for most this is way too much time for taking selfies. Also 50% of teenagers before posting a selfie would be likely to edit it.
Going into the beauty standard of selfies, is just another unachievable issue mainly for women to face. As I just said in the last statistic 50% of teenagers edit their selfies before posting them. This furthermore translates to the beauty standard isn’t even achievable for the regular person because nothing is real anymore. The era of looking perfect all the time isn’t real because being perfect isn’t nature. This fact has messed with me because I used to be one of those girls, I would never send a selfie without a filter on it, I never felt pretty without it, I always felt my forehead was too big, or my skin looked really bad. These factors have affected me as the person I am, and I wouldn’t wish that mental fatigue on anyone. The social pressure of looking good is high enough that the power of social media is just making it harder for it to be a real human these days.
