"There’s an art to taking the perfect selfie.
The Kardashians know the secret. Ariana Grande religiously follows one rule.
And that is apparently taking them from the left-hand side.
According to Dr Anukka Lindell, senior lecturer in experimental neuropsychology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, our left sides are more attractive than our right.
She began her research by searching the hashtag #selfie, and then analysed the 10 most recent pictures of 100 men and 100 women.
After going through more than 200 pictures, she found that the vast majority of selfies were taken from the left side, as opposed to the right or centre-on.
‘92% of the sample showed an overall posing bias, with 41% favouring their left cheek, 31.5% preferring their right cheek and 19.5% repeatedly posting midline selfies,’ Dr Lindell writes in Frontieres in Psychology.
‘Whilst research indicates that midline poses are perceived as being just as emotionally expressive as left-cheek poses, they are less frequently adopted for a simple reason: they appear less flattering.
‘Tips for posing for the “perfect selfie” regularly include avoid facing the camera head on in a midline pose, unless one is aiming to look bigger; instead, adopting a 3/4 or 2/3 turn toward the camera is encouraged as it introduces more angles, highlights the cheekbones, and makes the subject of the photo appear slimmer.’
She also found that women typically tend to have a higher preference for the left side over guys.
But this isn’t a phenomenon exclusive to the selfie generation.
Artists throughout history have opted to highlight sitters’ left sides – including da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
‘The theory is that the left cheek poses are intuitively perceived as more emotionally open an expressive than right cheek poses,’ says Dr Lindell."
Source: Miranda Larbi, www.metro.co.uk