Why do blemishes and acne look worse in pictures than irl?
In: Technology
There are way too many parts of the full answer to post here, but I’ll cover those that are most important.
First, consider how almost all folks see their own reflections, and also how we see other people whom we admire enough to linger on their faces.
The former involves a lot of denial and basic narcissism or very creative lighting. The latter involves one’s appropriately named “rose colored glasses” so to speak.
Second, there are way more sebaceous glands on the face and scalp than the rest of the body. Which means there’s a lot more oil in those places. Combine oil with light from a camera’s flash or even natural lighting and you get a kind of acne and blemish highlighter.
Third, it’s not that it looks worse per se, it’s simply the psychological distance a camera allows which a mirror doesn’t. It’s the same kind of difference between a writer’s first draft and the final product a reader experiences.
There are two main reasons. The first is the color gamut differences because of the lighting and camera sensor, versus what we naturally see with our eyes. Our eyes are sensitive to a wider range of colors than what a typical camera sensor can capture, as well as what a typical computer or phone screen can produce. This is why pictures of sunsets don’t look as vibrant as actual sunsets, unless the photo is manipulated to better capture the impression. There can also be differences in automatic color balance by the camera that enhance red/yellow tones more than our brain does.
The second reason is that when you look at someone, you are looking from at least a reasonable distance, and small features are blurry and ignored. But a camera can focus quite well at high resolution across the whole frame (unlike our eyes, which only see a little bit of detail at once). Then we look at the photo on a screen very close to our face, and can actually make out more detail (more imperfections) than we’d see normally.
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