The Ugly Selfie...

More and more people are jumping off the selfie wagon, thankfully. No more can you get away with posting a picture of yourself without one of your friends making fun of you for being so self absorbed and aware of your own attractiveness (how dare you!).

But people are so obsessed with themselves that they had to find a new way to be able to promote themselves online without looking like a conceited idiot,

Enter the ugly selfie. For those of you who don’t know, you’re missing out. Ugly selfies are my new favourite thing. They work especially well with Snapchat. What’s the deal?

Instead of duckface or spending several minutes getting that perfect angle to make you look glorious in your selfie, the idea is to make yourself look as gross as possible. Double chins are certain winners. Wide nostrils. Antonie Dixon crazy eyes. If you can combine all these things for the ultimate ugly selfie, you’ve achieved something great.

I recently sent out a picture of my self where it looked like I had no teeth. It was amazing.

Selfie was the 2013 word of the year. The selfie has become such a huge Internet trend that is really does have real life repercussions. Young girls and boys spending hours and hours trying to perfect the sexy selfie, the pretty selfie, the trying not to be pretty but I just am selfie

It puts more and more emphasis on looks and increases insecurity. These images get shared and can go viral and can create peer pressure and bullying (hot or not lists anyone). In short, the selfie is bad news.

So the new trend of the ugly selfie is great. It’s allowing girls especially to poke fun of themselves while poking fun at the selfie trend as well. It’s making girls feel less insecure and obsessed with looks, and it allows everyone to get in on the trend. It doesn’t matter what you look like; you can spend hours making yourself look as stupid as possible, rather than spending those same hours trying to look how other people want you to.

Celebrities being okay with looking ugly is making this trend even more acceptable. Jennifer Lawrence is beloved the world over for not taking herself too seriously and acting like a total wack job.

Instead of girls thinking she’s a dork, young girls and adults alike are obsessed with her. Claire Danes has multiple memes and web pages dedicated to her “ugly cry”, which is showing viewers that to be a respected actress doesn’t mean you have to be beautiful all the time, that it’s actually better to be authentic and look gross while you sob.

We spend so much time trying to hide our flaws using filters and cropping tools. No more freckles or pimples or bumpy noses or puffy eyes. Our culture has set us up by making us feel like we’re not perfect and that that is something to be ashamed of.

That we should only be seen by the world if we look a certain way. It’s why my sister has to put on make up to go to the dairy whereas I will go in my trackies with no bra, but if I actually saw anyone that I knew I would be totally and utterly mortified, but my laziness outweighs this risk.

The ugly selfie is telling us the complete opposite; promote and poke fun at all those imperfections. Don’t give trollers the opportunity to pick out your flaws; shove those flaws in people’s faces and tell them how much you don’t care.

There is a big however to this article. Ugly selfies are still posed. People are purposely making caricatures of themselves to show people how much they don’t care. Whereas those same people are very likely to untag themselves or not upload genuine, unposed photos that are unflattering.

I’m not saying every photo should be made available for you to be a genuine person who isn’t self conscious, because that’s mental. But it does show that people still care about what others think you look like in a general, every day scenario.

If you look gross in a group shot, you don’t want people seeing it and judging you. That’s a fair point, but it’s still said that people will see you, judge you, and think you’re gross. It’s sad that we have to worry about it at all.

Ugly selfies are a reminder to be genuine, and to remind people that you probably look gross a lot of the time. When you’re sick. When you’re watching TV at home. When you’ve just eaten an entire pizza and feel disgusting.

Those posed profile pictures aren’t real. They are deliberately constructed to make us look appealing. And the great thing about the ugly selfie is that people love it. Most people will catch on and jump on the bandwagon, rather than pointing out any flaws or trying to give you crap about promoting yourself of social media.