Gross Anatomy. Mara Altman

self, and if so, can we ever see it?

      At first, I suspected that the inconsistency I experienced with my looks was solely an issue with the medium I used to view myself. There was something mysterious that happened—I became uglified—when my image hopped from a reflection to a photograph. Cameras, those bastard devices, had always misunderstood me.

      To fill me in on what might be happening, I spoke with Pamela Rutledge, the director of the Media Psychology Research Center. She said what many of us might already know: The mirror is a small white lie. It flips our image. Unless our faces are perfectly symmetrical—which happens only in the rarest of supermodel cases—we will likely feel uneasy when we see a photograph of ourselves. The nose that usually leans to the right in a photo leans to the left.

      “It can look slightly off and therefore look funny to us,” Rutledge said. She explained that many of us prefer our mirror self simply because we see it more often. “We like what’s familiar,” she said.

      “We like what’s familiar” sounded like an off-the-cuff generality, but it’s actually science. We tend to develop a preference for things—sounds, words, and paintings—for no other reason than that we are accustomed to them. This concept, called the Mere Exposure Effect, was proved in the 1960s by a Stanford University psychologist named Robert Zajonc. (Finally, there’s an answer to the shoulder-pad craze of the 1980s. Just by being repeatedly exposed to something—even if it’s heinous—you can come to think of it as a good-looking fashion statement.)

      Another issue with the mirror is that we all, unconsciously, shift into flattering positions—hide the double chin, suck in the stomach, pop the hip—but it takes only one candid photo to haunt all that hard work and make you second-guess everything. I thought my arms were svelte little hockey sticks until a camera came along at an angle I was unaccustomed to and captured them in a way that gave me a month of night sweats.

      Photographs, like mirrors, also don’t tell the whole truth. Depending on lighting, focus, and lens size, they can distort us in various subtle ways.

      “So which is more truthful?” I asked Rutledge of the two mediums.

      “‘Truth’ is such a subjective word,” she said. “A mirror is going to feel more comfortable to you, but a picture is how other people see you.”