Selfie tricks

If you were not already aware of it, I would like to inform my readers that Hong Kong is the most selfie-obsessed city in the world. I have not visited Beijing or Shanghai, as yet, and maybe I will correct my impression after a trip to China. But for now, let me reiterate that the people of Hong Kong are more preoccupied with clicking a selfie, than the folks of any other metropolis in the entire globe.

Till the advent of the smartphones, I did not even know what a selfie was. For those of us still unfamiliar with the term, “selfie” is defined in the Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (ALD) as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically clicked with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media”.

However, the ALD omits to mention that a selfie is the best thing that happened to narcissists, who are people with an inordinate fascination with oneself, and suffer from excessive self-love. What I really admire about this statement is the analysis that excess of self-love is a suffering, but here I digress.

Coming back to Hong Kong, which was inundated with excursionists because of a local holiday, I saw more families gathered before a selfie stick than around a picnic basket. My stress levels rose every time I saw a person wandering towards the main road without taking their eyes off a cellphone that was mounted on a horizontal stick. But somehow, just before I mustered the courage to shout out a warning to the strangers, they would stop, smile one last time at their camera image, and turn back to the safety of the sidewalk. My sigh of relief would be short lived as another group duplicated the actions of the former. 

Taking a selfie was an art form initially, but with the new beauty apps that one can download, it has now become a science. These days, along with smiling beatifically one can also, quite literally, transform oneself. The “eye-widening, skin lightening, chin narrowing and cheeks thinning” beautifying apps are easily assessable and capitalise on the spending power of the consumers. Rather than acquire feelings of inadequacy, the fans of selfie photo editing insist that it gave them confidence.

A 25-year-old college student I met said that she spent at least two hours a day taking selfies. When I looked at her in disbelief, she explained that these days when youngsters went out, it simply meant finding a place to take pictures and after editing them to make themselves look beautiful, post them on the social media. She loved the compliments that she received on Facebook and she wished that she could live in the world of a soft hued filtered version of herself, forever. 

To underline her point she handed me her selfie stick and asked me to click my picture on her phone. She then got to work on the snapshot of my face and widened my eyes to unnatural proportions. My lips acquired an artificial pout and my hair looked glossier than when I was a teenager. Impulsively, I SMSed my photograph to my husband who was tied up in an official conference.

“You made a new friend today?” he messaged. 

“Well, yes,” I typed. 

“Beautiful lady, where did you meet her?” he was curious. 

“Ahem, that’s me,” I wrote. 

“You didn’t look like that this morning!” he exclaimed. 

“It’s my selfie reincarnation,” I replied, adding a smiley emoticon.