NEWS

Want the perfect selfie? There's an app for that

Carol Gorga Williams
@APPCarol
  • AOL.com,/Today Show: 65% of teen girls feel flattering selfies boosts their confidence.
  • Same AOL.com/Today Show survey: 53% say photos of themselves posted by others makes them feel bad.
  • Harvard: risk of eating disorders higher in teens who spend a lot of time on social media sites.

Want to look 15 pounds thinner? Improve your smile or your complexion? Remove blemishes from your face? ● Well, there are apps for that. ● In fact, the drive for the perfect selfie — those self-posed photographs that people take of themselves and post everywhere on social media — has psychologists and plastic surgeons concerned about whether social media is amplifying the insecurities that teens have about their appearance and body image. ● Selfies also are morphing from the do-it-yourself variety into those shot by professional photographers after the person is prettified by professional makeup artists and hair stylists.

Key to love? Paris swaps selfies for bridge locks

"There has always been a push to compare ourselves" to unrealistic media ideals of beauty, said Dr. Ramon Solhkhah, chief of psychiatry at Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune.

"Back 100 years ago, it was painting and sculpture and then over the past few decades, magazines — then social media has made this explode. As a problem, you can't get away from it whether it is the constant bombardment of pictures and constant comparison of ideals," he said.

Celebrity selfies

That young women have sought to look like celebrities is nothing new. When reality star Kim Kardashian — whose airbrushed visage often is the one mimicked by others on Instagram — recently visited Casino Pier in Seaside Heights, patrons jockeyed for position to get their own selfies with Kardashian in the background.

But experts say what is new is the impact social media is having on young people and their need for acceptance. With social media, the exposure is to million of people and those at the top of the distribution list tend to be people you know well, who can reach out 24/7 to tell you whether you measure up.

A 2002 landmark Harvard study that examined the rise of eating disorders in Fiji — where the model of beauty historically is more robust and where exposure to television and Internet has been limited — found a link to body dissatisfaction and eating pathology in females who relied on social media sites to filter what was being said about television's Westernized beauty ideals. The "thin ideal" had arrived at the remote island location.

Disordered eating

According to the National Eating Disorders Association, body dissatisfaction or what experts call "disordered eating" is not attributable to any single cause, but research indicates that media plays a role. Adolescent girls are more afraid of gaining weight than getting cancer, losing their parents or nuclear war, according to The Rader Programs, which offers eating disorder treatment.

The thin ideal sentiment often is displayed as that of a young female body with requisite prominent collarbone: "Every time you say no to food, you say yes to thin," is one slogan that became common on such sites.

Research in the area is ongoing and vast. The National Eating Disorders Association maintains a variety of studies that have linked exposure to the thin ideal portrayed in mass media to a feeling of being dissatisfied with one's body.

Starts in childhood

It appears to be stronger in young adults, suggesting that long-term exposure during childhood and adolescence lays the groundwork for the negative effects when viewers/users grow into young adulthood, experts say.

To look at the impact on body image, researchers at the University of Strathclyde, Ohio University and University of Iowa recently surveyed 881 U.S. women college students who were asked about their use of Facebook, eating and exercise regimes and body image.

The research did not find a link between use of social media and eating disorders but it concluded that the more time people spent on Facebook, the more they compared their bodies with those of their friends and the more they felt negative about their appearance.

In YouTube videos, users ask anonymous viewers if they are pretty. They rate each other on Instagram beauty pageants in which entrants — who are supposed to be above the age of 13 and remain anonymous — ask for a judgment on their attractiveness, using hashtags such as #beautycontest or #rateme. (Hashtags on social media sites such as Twitter or Instagram refer to a word or phrase preceded by a hash or pound sign (#) that is used to identify messages on a specific topic.)

Some young women use the services of professional stylists before posting glamourized versions of themselves taken by professional photographers onto their social media sites. And if professional stylists are unavailable or unaffordable, people may avail themselves of a variety of apps and filters that do everything from reducing the subject's weight up to 15 pounds, to improving smiles, removing blemishes and enhancing complexion. Cheek contouring also is available — as is removing black circles under the eyes.

'Astonishing' app

"My friend was showing me this app that literally changed every single thing about her face. It was sort of astonishing," said Ryen Baeza, 20, a Monmouth University student.

Jennifer McGovern, a sociology lecturer at Monmouth University, seconds that sentiment. Her children are grown now but she thinks parents should limit young people's exposure to social media. Last semester, many of her students studied the phenomena but she knows it well from witnessing behavior in her hometown of Fair Haven. She jokes that she lives on the other side of the tracks in the tony community.

"They will do whatever it takes" for the social media ideal, she said. Some postings include such sentiments as "I only feel beautiful when I am hungry" and "Relax. I'll be fine" with an illustration of a girl cutting herself with a razor blade.

"They starve themselves and then they are worried they are too flat," McGovern said. "Their parents are not saying 'you are a wonderful, confident young woman.' They are saying 'OK, I will buy you a boob job for your 16th birthday."'

It's a trend that worries Valentina T. Sanchez of Asbury Park who also is Miss New Jersey Teen USA 2014. She placed fourth this week in the national contest in the Bahamas.

"I think the problem is girls want to look like celebrities but they don't realize some of them are not healthy. They are spending money to have these beautiful pictures taken in order to look like Angelina Jolie," said Sanchez, 18. "They don't realize that not even Angelina Jolie looks like that. It is Photoshop and hair extensions. I'm not saying I don't wear makeup or hair extensions, but I don't do it every day."

Plastic surgery

Those in search of the perfect selfie apparently would rather endure painful plastic surgery to attain the unattainable, according to the annual survey conducted by The American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Survey.

There, the 2,700-member academy determined selfies are having a "huge" impact on its industry.

Some 13 percent of plastic surgeons in the group said increased photo sharing and patients' dissatisfaction with their own image on social media sites was a rising trend in practice: a 10 percent increase in rhinoplasty, a 7 percent increase in hair transplants and a 6 percent increase in eyelid surgery.

Dr. Edward Farrior, academy president, said social media still is having less of an impact than the extreme makeover shows of the early 2000s.

Social media has helped patients finally take action on a part of their bodies that previously bothered them: Social media was the telescopic.

"With social media, you lose control of your own image," he said. And in his practice, patients of all ages are coming in for social-media inspired work.

"With younger people, it usually is a structural issue" like noses, "while older people are seeing a different thing" and want more cosmetic changes like Botox or facelifts.

He terms it "putting your best face forward."

"If you can't love yourself, there is no way you can love somebody else or accept the love of somebody else," said Marcelle Chevriere-DiBiasi, 25, a Monmouth University senior majoring in health studies. "People spend their whole lives fighting the inevitable. You are going to get old and not look the way you did before."

Janice C. Stapley, associate professor of gender studies at Monmouth University, also believes boys and girls need to be taught early to reject the stereotypes that are all around them.

"By the time they are teenagers, they are as self-conscious as they can be," Stapley said. "And combine it with the societal message that your attractiveness is your worth and it is amazing that there are not more kids with serious problems."

And while the real damage largely has been directed at young girls, the emerging trend now includes males who are encouraged to work out or wax body parts before they allow their own selfies to be taken.

"I definitely have friends — and I think it is very secretive — this struggle they have to maintain a certain image online," said Chevriere-DiBiasi.

If one is on social media, it is hard to avoid the sites that advocate what some bill as healthy if extreme dieting. As with most social media, there is the shorthand. Blogs on sites like Tumblr advocate "pro-ana" or pro-anorexia and "thinspiration," or "thinspo."

Online bullying

various hashtags seem to be in a state of perpetual multiplication: #thinspo, #anorexic, #hip bones. The Urban Dictionary — which, like Wikipedia, is defined by its users — produces eight pages of related terms and images "#thinspo" is searched.

"It used to be you would get bullied and that was the end of it," Solhkhah said. "But now the bullying … drags on for days and days and days, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That is part of the increase we've seen in terms of stress and eating disorders among young women and young men."

It is the world that has introduced us to the "#thigh gap," which advocates another feminine "ideal" — that a "beautiful" woman should have a clear space between her legs when she is standing with her feet together, a gap physicians say is almost impossible for women to achieve because of bone structure and other issues.

"It astonishes me that someone will believe something that is so obviously not good for them," Baeza said. "I'm appalled by it."