Why do I look different in photos than in the mirror?
You check the mirror and think: fine. Then someone shows you a photo and you think: is that really me? Almost everyone feels this, and it isn't vanity. There are concrete reasons, some in your head and some in the camera, why a photo looks off and often older.
The mirror flips your face
No face is perfectly symmetrical: a parting, an eyebrow, a crooked smile. In the mirror you always see yourself flipped left to right, and that flipped face is the one you know best. A photo shows you the other way round, so it feels slightly wrong even when it's accurate.
A classic 1977 experiment showed this. People preferred a mirror-image print of their own face, while their friends preferred the true print: each liked the version they were used to seeing (Mita, Dermer and Knight, 1977).
The phone is closer than any person
People usually see you from a metre or two away. A selfie is taken from about 30 cm, and at that distance perspective changes the face. Researchers estimated that a selfie from 30 cm makes the nose look about 30% wider than a photo from 1.5 metres (Ward and colleagues, 2018). The face looks rounder, the ears disappear and the features crowd towards the middle.
Wide lenses stretch the edges
Phone cameras use wide-angle lenses. Anything near the edge of the frame gets stretched, which is why the person at the end of a group photo always looks wider. Keep your face near the centre.
A photo freezes one moment
In the mirror your face moves: you adjust, you find your angle and your brain averages what it sees. A photo catches a single instant, often a half-blink or an expression between two others. Lines you never notice in motion stay put in a photo, and that alone can add years.
The light is different
Bathroom mirrors are often lit from the front or from several sides, which fills in shadows. A photo taken under a ceiling lamp or the midday sun puts shadows under the eyes and deepens every line. If light is the problem, the fix is easy, and it's the first of these 8 tips to look younger in photos.
So which one is the real you?
Neither, exactly. Other people see you in three dimensions, moving, from a metre or two away, and not flipped. The closest thing is a photo someone else takes from that distance, in soft light, with a natural expression. And the only way to know what age others actually see is to ask people who don't know you: on AgeDart you post a selfie and strangers guess your age. More in how old do I look?
Put your eye to the test
Guess the age of real people from all over the world, or post a selfie and find out how old the world thinks you are.
Play today's challenge on the web