Almost every client says some version of this before we’ve even started a photoshoot. They say it on the phone and then repeat it as soon as they walk in the studio. “I’m not photogenic”, “I look terrible in photos” or “Please make me look thinner“.
I used to take it as a one-off, a bit of nerves before the camera comes out, but after years of doing this, I know better. If you’ve ever asked yourself why do I hate photos of myself, you’re not alone, it’s nearly universal. And it turns out there’s real, well-documented research behind it, none of which has anything to do with how you actually look, and some of which is far more recent than you’d expect.
So, why do I hate photos of myself?
The short answer: it’s not your face doing this to you. It’s a mix of how mirrors work, how selfies distort your proportions, and a beauty standard you never actually agreed to. Here’s each piece, in order.
It’s not your face, it’s the mirror
Here’s the bit that surprises people. The face you’re used to isn’t your “real” face. It’s your face in the mirror, flipped, reversed left to right and you’ve been looking at that flipped version of yourself every day of your life. Psychologists call this the mere-exposure effect, first described by Robert Zajonc back in 1968: the more we’re exposed to something, the more comfortable we become with it, and comfort quietly becomes a stand-in for “correct”.
There was a study done in 1977, where researchers showed women two versions of their own photo, the real one and the mirror-flipped one, then showed the same two photos to a close friend or partner. The women picked their mirror image as the “real” one, nearly every time. Their friends picked the actual photo, nearly every time. Same two pictures, opposite answers, just because one person had spent a lifetime staring at the flip and the other hadn’t.
A photo isn’t wrong. It shows the version everyone else sees, but it’s unfamiliar to you. Your brain doesn’t experience that as “oh, that’s what I look like.” It experiences it as “wrong,” because it doesn’t match the mirror image you’ve subconsciously memorised over decades.
And now there’s a second mirror, always in our pocket
Here’s where it gets more complicated than it used to be. The mirror isn’t the only reversed image you see of yourself anymore. Most of us now take selfies, often daily, and most phones show you a mirrored preview while you’re framing the shot, the same flipped orientation you already trust. So the selfie doesn’t just add a second photo to compare against the mirror. For many people, it becomes a second mirror, checked far more often than the one on the wall.
I’m reading a book called Selfie by Will Storr at the moment, which turned out to be very different from what the title suggested, and far more interesting, partly because it covers a topic that’s hard, and one I’m living through myself right now. He interviews a young woman named CJ, an extreme case by her own admission, who told him she’d stopped using her actual mirror altogether. She held her phone up instead when she did her make-up, because the mirror simply wasn’t relevant to her anymore. She wasn’t exaggerating either. On top of memory cards and a hard drive, she’d recently had to buy extra iCloud storage, entirely for selfies.
Most of us aren’t CJ. But her story is a magnified version of something much smaller and much more ordinary: the selfie she eventually posted wasn’t just flipped and warped by a phone held too close. It was also edited, chosen, filtered, specifically to look flawless enough to earn likes and comments from people who don’t actually know her. Two layers of distortion stacked on each other, one from the lens, one from the intention behind it, and both aimed at strangers rather than at anything true.
Here’s the catch though. Selfies feel familiar because phones flip the preview, the same way a mirror does. But hold a phone that close to your face and the lens itself distorts things, your nose looks bigger, your face gets stretched. There’s research on this too: photos taken at typical selfie distance can make your nose look around 30% wider relative to your face than it actually is. So a selfie gives you the familiar flip, while also lying to you about your own proportions. You end up trusting a face that’s part memory, part mirror, part slightly warped selfie, and none of it is quite what a camera at a proper distance actually sees.
Then comes the moment of truth, when you sit down for an actual portrait session. You’re not just comparing it to one familiar reference. You’re comparing it to two, a flipped mirror and a warped, flipped selfie, both of which you’ve seen thousands of times, and neither of which is what a photograph taken properly, at the right distance, by someone paying real attention, is going to show you. That’s also part of the power of really being seen, and the bravery of letting yourself be seen. Not everyone is ready to do that.
You’re also comparing it to an impossible standard
On top of all that, there’s the gap between how you actually look and some picture in your head of how you’re “supposed” to look. Psychologists have a name for this too, self-discrepancy theory, but you don’t need the name to recognise the feeling. It’s a second answer to why do I hate photos of myself. Not the mirror this time, but years of comments, comparisons, old photos you didn’t like, and beauty standards that were never really about you.
Once that gap exists, you go looking for proof of it. The double chin, the tired eyes, the extra weight or the angle you’d never have chosen. You’re not really looking at the photo anymore. You’re looking at it through everything you already believed before you even look at it.
Editing yourself doesn’t help, it makes it worse
You’d think editing your photos would close that gap, right? And yes, we all edit our photos these days, some of us now leaning on AI-generated versions too. Research says the opposite happens. A 2023 study followed young adults’ photo-editing habits and found that the more people edited their own selfies, the more they started seeing themselves as something to be assessed rather than just themselves, and the more they compared their looks to others. Both of those were linked to lower self-esteem, not higher.
So the more control we’re handed over our own image, smoothing, adjusting, choosing the one usable frame out of thirty, the worse many of us end up feeling about the real thing underneath it. Editing yourself doesn’t quiet the gap self-discrepancy theory describes. It tends to widen it.
None of this is a personal failing
So, back to the real question: why do I hate photos of myself? I want to say this plainly, because I don’t think it gets said enough. Disliking photos of yourself isn’t proof you’re un-photogenic. It’s not proof you’re not beautiful either. It’s proof your brain is doing exactly what brains do. Someone who spent years trusting a flipped mirror, a slightly warped selfie, and a beauty standard that was never fair to begin with. And by the way, we should probably retire the word “photogenic” altogether.
Once you know that, the whole conversation changes. The problem was never your face. It was the gap between two mirrors you’ve trusted for years, neither of which was ever showing you what a proper camera, held at the right distance by someone paying attention, actually sees. Plus a mind cluttered by years of negative thoughts and bias about body image, perfectionism, old voices and comments accumulated over time, versions of not being enough. All of it, unconsciously, is part of the frame.
Why a session is different from a snapshot
This is exactly why I don’t just point a camera and click. A quick phone photo, taken by a stranger or a friend mid-conversation, gives your brain nothing to work with except that unfamiliar, unflipped, frozen face, caught at a moment you didn’t choose. A selfie gives you familiarity, but not accuracy. It’s the same mismatch behind why do I hate photos of myself in the first place, just in a different form.
A proper session works differently. We take time before the camera even comes out, tea in hand if you’re in the studio, until the nerves settle. I shoot from a proper distance, so there’s none of that close-up selfie warping. I catch you across dozens of small, moving moments instead of betting everything on one frozen frame. And yes, there’s editing afterwards too, there always is, but it’s done by the same person who sat with you in that room and actually saw you, not aimed at flawless, not aimed at strangers. It’s aimed at keeping you looking like yourself. No filter standing between you and what the camera actually saw.
By the end, what you’re looking at doesn’t feel like a stranger wearing your face. Often, for the first time in years, it just feels like being seen. That’s not a trick of flattering light, although the light matters too. It’s giving your brain the time, the accurate proportions, and the motion it needs to update a picture that’s been built, quietly and for years, out of two mirrors that were never quite telling the truth.
Why do I hate photos of myself? An invitation, not a fix
I’m not going to pretend one session rewires decades of self-discrepancy, or undoes however many thousands of selfies came before it. But I’ve watched it happen enough times to believe it’s worth doing anyway: a woman looks at her own photo and, instead of the usual flinch, feels something closer to recognition. Not “who is that.” Just, “oh. There I am.”
If any of this sounds familiar, the reluctance, the phone held up instead of the mirror, the running list of angles to avoid, maybe it’s worth asking what would happen if you let yourself be seen properly, just once, by someone whose whole job is paying attention to you rather than catching you off guard. That’s the work. It always has been.
If you’re curious what it might feel like to be seen properly, I’d love to hear from you.
This post contains an affiliate link. If you buy through it, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
