Technology is changing the world in many ways, including influencing the way we perceive ourselves. We live in a world where everyone has high-resolution cameras on their phones, which naturally leads to greater exposure of our own online photos. For most of us, more selfies mean a higher number of instances than ever to simply underline our facial imperfections and highlight our flaws. Dozens of portraits popping up on the Internet may not seem like an issue to those blessed with facial symmetry, just like the mythological character “Adonis”, but the rest of us, the lowly mortals, are doomed to live with our crooked, flabby noses and asymmetrical ears.

Back in the good old days (at a time before computers but after dinosaurs), people didn’t have to worry too much about how they looked, or at least they didn’t have a constant reminder of every bad day slapping them in the face. Every encounter would not be mentioned and shared among peers.  Today, nearly a billion people use some form of social media, and there’s no hiding place from last week’s unflattering exposure.

First of all, I should point out that the face of each and every individual is asymmetrical. When we digitally isolate the right and left halves of the face, take the mirror images of the images that we isolated and make a full face from the right and left-side images, the result is surprising. Full faces obtained from the right and left faces look like identical twins. Now that we have this definition, it shouldn’t be hard to guess how natural it is to look different in portrait photos taken from the right and left.

The nose is no exception to this. The nose is structurally composed of “pairs” of bone, cartilage and soft tissue, and these pairs are often not symmetrical. Rhinoplasty often corrects curvatures and asymmetries in the nose but cannot eliminate them. Even if you have a nose job, asymmetries and minor axial curvatures in the nose will persist.

After the surgery, my patients may submit complaints, saying “Doc, I am very happy with my nose, but in photos, it looks different from the right and left.” I think it will be useful for rhinoplasty candidates to have knowledge about these details in this age of technology in order to enjoy a more comfortable post-operative process.

Another factor is the device with which the photo is taken. Is it Samsung? Is it an iPhone? Or another device? Did you know that photos taken on smartphones, particularly where the camera is off-center and wide-angle, can be digitally deformed and exhibit asymmetries much more clearly than they actually are?

As anyone dealing with the art of photography knows very well, it is quite easy to make a face look more beautiful or uglier than it is. Minor changes in the direction, intensity and color of the light can lead to faces that look completely different in photographs. While photographing the faces of the models and celebrities you see on the covers of the magazines, thousands of frames are shot, one of which is selected and processed digitally for improvement so that the resulting perfect photo can be printed.

After all, rhinoplasty will positively change both your profile picture and your face. On the other hand, you will live wearing your face, not your profile photo. So just leave your profile pictures on your social media pages and enjoy your new face.