I keep getting struck by how many pictures of so many of us are up on Facebook…and how unflattering many of those pictures are. When I was growing up, there weren’t that many pictures of us and most of them were posed. People tried to look their best in those posed pictures and while we didn’t always attain that goal, we were rarely caught in strange, unflattering poses. And if we looked really bad in a picture it was easy to get rid of it.
On Facebook there are so many candid photos of us looking anything but our best. And there is no controlling these pictures as there are so many of them and its practically impossible to get rid of the last digital copy of a phot.
In the last month I met two women who had friended me on Facebook before I met them. I didn’t recognize them in person because they did not look like their photos but were enormously more attractive than their pictures.
Could this be a healthy phenomena?
A friend once told me that fashion photography, with its airbrushed pictures of attractive and, often artificially enhanced, women, created enormous amount of axniety for women (as did movies.)
Is it possible that all these awful pictures is going to give us all a lot more confidence in our appearance?
Will the shock of how much better we look than these awful pictures make us seem all that more attractive in person?