Welcome to Make Your Face, a makeup tutorial series with a simple mission: makeup by you (me) for your (my) own entertainment, Establishment-style.
I hate it when people tell me I’m photogenic. It’s such a backhanded compliment, particularly when delivered in person; it carries a strong scent of “whoa, you look WAAAAAAY better in pictures than you do irl, man!” Unknowingly adding insult to injury, because it’s not even true! My brother is the photogenic one of the two of us. He can stop whatever he’s doing, drop a blank slack-jawed face in front of a camera lens—any camera lens—and turn a photograph to GOLD! When I am caught wearing my typical resting expression on camera, I look bored, slightly stoned, and vaguely dissatisfied, in an unflattering wow-that’s-not-a-good-picture way, not a sexy model-face way.
No, I have worked for years to look incredible in photos, and I refuse to diminish my labors with that awful adjective, photogenic. Like it just HAPPENED that way, HA! Naïfs.
“I refuse to diminish my labors with that awful adjective, photogenic.”
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Today, we discuss the art of the selfie, beginning with:
How do I not look terrible using front facing camera??
This is a common stumbling block for the would-be selfie taker. There are very real and interesting reasons why we so often don’t recognize and therefore shun our non-mirrored self images! But we’re not going that deep here. The thing is, that image you see in the viewscreen? Isn’t you. It’s a little flat fraction of an instant, a remnant of reflected photons rendered in colored pixels on your phone. A bad selfie is not the Almighty Truth of God thundering down to reveal the objective truth of your ugliness! A bad selfie is just a byproduct of the process required to get good selfies, and you just delete it and forget about it immediately. It takes some time to adjust to this mindset, but when you hit the point where you can look at a bad selfie and feel nothing, just double-delete it as the meaningless detritus it is . . . it’s just another level, man. SO freeing!
That’s the first step, because the second step is to take a literal fuck-ton of selfies. You’ve got to develop an understanding of your set-up and equipment, basically, and also learn both of your jobs as model and photographer. It’s a lot to manage at once! It takes practice. Everybody has angles they prefer, and you can’t find out how you best like to see yourself until you try a ton of angles, expressions, lighting conditions, etc. You’ll scroll through reams of selfies you hate, and hopefully find a handful that don’t necessarily make you want to die immediately: Those are the ones that’ll show you your preferred angle/s. Practice it. Perfect it. Refine it. Do it ‘til you know you can just slide straight into it without effort, your selfie pose. Then once you’ve got that down, you can start getting really weird with it!
“A bad selfie is not the Almighty Truth of God thundering down to reveal objective truth.”
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A word of warning: The discovering-preferred-selfie-angles project can be disconcerting, because the expressions that feel good, comfortable, and attractive on our faces in life often look, well, wonk as hell in selfies. Don’t have a horrible existential crisis over it—it’s not you! It is everyone. Do NOT let it creep into self-consciousness about the expressions you make in real life. You’re perfect! Just figure out how to mug for the camera so it shows you something closer to what you wanna see, closer to the way other people actually perceive you. Questing for a good selfie is a game! It’s a performance. It is NOT the Ultimate Arbiter of Truth and Beauty. Only in accepting this truth can you begin to improve as a front-facing selfie-snapper.
ALSO, nobody said you gotta take your selfies with the front-facing camera: Mirror selfies are excellent! (And reminder: Prior to shooting a mirror selfie, think about the stuff that’s visible in the background. A little pre-selfie organization never hurt nobody.)
Now: Lighting.
Lighting is everything. EVERYTHING. Paying attention to the light around you is what separates amateurs from dreamland perfect gauzy unreal babes on Instagram. (That and filters, which we will attend to momentarily.) LIGHT. Light! Light light light light. You’ve got to have good lighting to look good. Sunlight is your friend!
“LIGHT. Light! Light light light light.”
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Bright glaring noonday light is harsh, but sunlight filtered through a window is a pretty sure bet at any time of day. That momentary “magic hour” period right before sunset gives you an un-filter-improvable glow. Morning light is lovely. When the sun goes down, streetlights cast a gorgeous warm glow! Unless they’ve got those blue-white bulbs, in which case it’ll give your pic more of a sci-fi feel. I’ve got a set of bulbs on a tri-pod with a sliding-intensity switch, since I take selfies professionally. You can turn a flashlight to good effect to either direct a glow onto your face, or shine it on one concentrated area so brightly it blows out your features completely. Sun blasts are good for erasing part or all of your face, too.
This is too big a topic to encompass adequately in any simple guide, so, just: LIGHTING! Lighting. Pay attention to it. Bask in it. Work with it! Use it. Love your lighting and let it love you. Lighting and shadow is how you draw the eye away from skin irregularities you’d rather the camera not emphasize. Get in there and move your face around in it!
Next?
How do you smile without looking like a dork?
The solution here is so simple, yet so difficult. To smile in a photo without looking like a dork, you must master the infamous smize. Start by squinting and unsquinting your eyes to see how it feels. Pay attention to the way your eyes squint when you really smile, and aim for a squint that’s somewhere on the rising point of full-out smiling, while your face is still getting there. This is your natural smize squint. Make like Cyclops and take off the sunglasses restraining your brain lasers; focus your beam of eyeball energy and shoot it out at a fixed point in space until the photo is snapped. That’s it! SMIZE! SMIZE! SMIZE!
Be warned, you have to roll with your actual true energy at that moment and laser a real feeling at/around the camera lens. If you are not an accomplished actor and attempt to fake at, say, being a sexy seductive mermaid when you are actually hungry, tired, overheated from the summer and your wig, and on the verge of a breakdown, it’ll, um, show.
Where do you look? Depends on the selfie. Do you want to look like you’re gazing wistfully out of a window thinking deep and beautiful thoughts? Don’t look straight into the camera, peer off to the side at about a 45° angle from the plane of the lens. Do you wanna look like you’re breaking the fourth wall to share an inside joke with whoever looks at your pic? Aim straight down the barrel of that sucker and smirk. As a general good-selfie rule, I recommend looking not directly into the lens, but just above it. It looks like you’re looking into the viewers’ eyes, but with this sort of vaguely ethereal otherworldly above-it-all vibe. Also, it just makes you look more cheerful! Or intimidating, if you’re shooting for that gazing-at-an-enemy-like-they’re-so-beneath-you-you-can’t-even-SEE-them vibe.
“Aim straight down the barrel of that sucker and smirk.”
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If the location in which you’re taking the selfie is an important part of the picture, you’ve got several options. You can hold the camera out as far as possible and try for an angle that gets some of you + some of the background in the photo. You can extend your reach with a selfie stick! You can prop the phone up, set the timer function, click the button, run out in front of it, and strike whatever pose your heart desires! Hands-free selfies are great. So are bursts! You can take multiple consecutive pictures by holding the iPhone button down (dunno how it works with other phone cams, but imagine there’s a similar function), or setting the camera to take a burst. Then you’ve got 10 images to choose from, and you won’t believe the difference a millisecond can make. Bursts are good tools for when you’re preening around trying to discover good selfie angles, too.
Dog selfies, much like children, cat, and miscellaneous other small uncontrollable creature selfies, are an advanced undertaking. When you take a selfie with a dog, you are not the boss of the picture. The dog is (probably) not going to hold still and strike a human-flattering pose with you. The dog is gonna dog, and you must become wildlife photographer and model in one in order to capture a non-mortifying image of the two of you in the same frame. Attracting Dog’s attention with a treat or toy is a good way to direct Dog’s gaze; most dogs don’t like to look at the camera. Stealthily following Dog’s line of sight and inserting your camera in its path and your smiling self behind is another tactic. I personally enjoy letting Dog Model set the tone of the photo shoot, imitating Dog’s facial expressions while snapping photos continuously. There’s no pressure on you to carry the photo when you selfie with a dog! Dog is the star, you’re just the support. Dogs will never let you down. Even bad dog selfies are golden.
“Dog selfies are an advanced undertaking.”
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A selfie etiquette question:
If I take a selfie with someone else, I look freaking awesome, but they look kinda like a troll, is it okay to post it?
This depends entirely upon the person in question, their level of actual troll-lookingness versus personal perception of troll-lookingness, how much you like them, and whether you’re in a good mood. If in doubt, follow the example of Our Most Blessed Selfie Saint Kim K. and crop ‘em out! And while we’re on that note, let us all take a moment to reflect upon her most glorious response to cropping criticism and commit it into our hearts: “Her eyes were closed and I was feeling my look! Can I live?!?!” You may live, Kim Kardashian, and so may we all.
“Ain’t nothin’ shameful about nudes.”
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Nobody asked me about nude selfies, but here is what I have to say about them anyway: If you want to take them, take them! By all means! Nudes are great! Just keep them far away from the internet and out of other people’s custody if you have not made peace with the prospect of them potentially resurfacing in damaging ways. Ain’t nothin’ shameful about nudes, but best to proactively attempt to keep them out of the hands of shitty people, if possible.
Filters and post-production stuff! Look, I see nothing wrong with clone-stamping out a zit visible on your face in a photo you otherwise love. It’s not deceitful or artificial or whatever; nobody ever made you sign a contract saying you *must* document mildly distressing skin freak-outs exactly as they appeared in the original snap or else you must forsake your status as a genuine and authentic person. Nor do I think you should necessarily erase “blemishes” from your photos just, as a matter. If it’s not bothering you, don’t worry about it! Editing is nice, when you want it, but I am lazy and prefer to rely on lighting to highlight or disguise what I do and don’t want people to look at in the original shot; then I don’t have to bother with it.
That said, I LOVE Instagram editing; tweaking those sliders around is incredibly satisfying. It often looks really good to put just a little bit of a filter on an image. Like, Clarendon at 25 gives green and blue shades a little boost while leeching ruddiness from my mid-August sweaty face, but then the finished selfie doesn’t read as *sirens-blaring* !FILTERED-TO-FUCK! when someone else looks at it.
This question from my friend Katie really hit me in the heart:
How do you get past your dumb brain problems of either a) thinking you look bad, or b) thinking you look *too* good and being afraid everyone will think you’re vain/braggy?
Oh girl. OH girl. The eternal conundrum.
As for the first, listen to that loud asshole voice in your brain, actually l.i.s.t.e.n. to the stuff it’s saying. It’s ridiculous!!! You are not ugly, you are not a piece of shit, you are not a festering pile of slugs encased in a skin suit (all things that asshole voice in my own brain has said to me, about me, repeatedly). Sometimes when you actually listen to it, it’s easier to dismiss. Then just walk away and don’t look at your selfies again for a while! Don’t look at them until way later, when that awful mood is so long past that you’ve forgotten about it and you can breath again. Look at your photos then. You don’t look bad. You don’t look bad at all! You look fantastic.
As for the vain/braggy paranoia: DAMN it’s a fucker, ain’t it? Because again, it’s just your brain making up this imaginary audience of critics! They don’t actually exist!! And if they do exist, well . . . fuck ‘em!
Like, if somebody out there in the world looks at a selfie you post and thinks, “Ugh, who does that bitch think she is, does she think she’s pretty or something?” well, like . . . YEAH. Look at the picture, mofo! In any case, they’re probably not going to actually say that to you, this hypothetical asshole, so you will in all likelihood continue on your merry way blissfully ignorant of their meanness, which will never occupy your precious brainspace! And if some bitter, nasty person DOES have the spleen to say something cruel to you over a freakin’ selfie? Block them! Block them immediately and without mercy; remove their voice from your world forever.
“The world needs more images of selves, all the time.”
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The world needs more images of selves, all the time. We need pictures that broaden our horizons, that let us know we’re not alone, that allow us both to see ourselves and also share a little peek at our interiority with others. Don’t trust anybody who sneers about selfies: These individuals are insecure, insistent upon enforcing their own rigid emotional restrictions on others, and apt to be murderers of joy. If someone ever says something shitty about one of your selfies to you, please let me know, and I will fight them for you.
Here’s an eclectic selection of a few selfie-takers I personally find delightful, presented here for your enjoyment:
Ijeoma Oluo, Establishment Editor-at-Large, is a phenomenal selfier. I just can’t get over her FACE. Her hair! Her style! Her glasses! And then sometimes she posts selfies without glasses and the cycle starts over at FACE again!!
John Leavitt, who I started following on Twitter because he writes stuff I like to read and makes cool cartoons . . . that guy’s selfie game is on another level.
This guy, @nomchompsky, I don’t know his real name or what he does, but I started following him on Twitter because a bunch of people I follow follow him, his tweets are sharp, and SWEET JESUS HAVE MERCY
My sister-in-law Hannah Haein Lee is a perfect human being and therefore of course is perfect at taking selfies.
This toddler Greta I know is a genius, I think; her photos just keep getting more and more amazing!
My dad is pretty great at selfies, too.
Don’t be scared of the selfie, gang. If in doubt, post the damn thing. The weirder it gets, the better!
And never forget, posing with a mannequin never fails to bring good luck. ♥
The post How To Master The Delightful Art Of Weird Selfies appeared first on The Establishment.