Without Filters or Beauty Apps, How Much “Real” Did I Meet? | Hack Your Life

Part 1 of our National Day experiment in quitting digital services

*Happy holidays!*Starting today, QDaily Lab will publish five life experiments on the theme of “quitting,” one a day through the holiday. What we want to know is this: out of the endless supply of internet services and technologies, which ones actually stay in our daily lives and become indispensable? Does having them make life better, or does it just feed laziness and dependence?

Today we tried giving up filters and photo editing.

In 2000 the world got its first phone with a camera in it, and from then on the bar for taking a photo kept dropping. Selfies became a life skill, a social culture, even a mental disorder. Some say Moments and Instagram are the real virtual reality.

Around 2007 I got my first camera phone and a compact point-and-shoot. Even though sharing back then meant syncing photos to social networking sites by MMS, the phone became the camera I used most — it was easy to share from, and its low pixel count made me feel good about how I looked.

Four years ago I started working as a tech reporter. Part of the job, every day, was to find and try out new and entertaining apps to recommend to readers, and a large share of them had to do with photography and photo editing. You can hardly imagine how much effort and invention developers keep pouring into making a photograph look better, or funnier, or stranger.

There are 22 photography and photo-editing apps on my phone right now, a tenth of everything installed on it. Besides the iPhone 8 Plus I use every day, my backup phone is a Meitu T9, which is no slouch at prettifying photos either.

Photo-editing apps have clearly become a necessity. For me, at least, they matter about as much as the toolbox I use to hail a cab, order food, or read a map. Photographing myself, other people, scenery — it's hard to imagine how uneasy I'd feel posting an unedited picture straight to Moments.

So I decided to spend a week on a different philosophy of photography: no photo-editing apps at all. Would I lose my mind?

In the week before the new iPhones came out, I shot with nothing but the iPhone's default camera. Every filter app, and the Meitu phone, went out of service. From September 10 to 16, I said goodbye to my beloved Foodie, Snapseed, Meitu Xiuxiu and Butter Camera, and to my Meitu phone. Even when I needed to add text or scribble a note on a picture, all I could use was WeChat's built-in image editor.

Here is my report.

I got everything ready before the experiment — and used almost none of it

I made a few preparations. I moved the photography apps I use most, which lived on my phone's first screen, into a folder called “Don't open this week.”

In case my willpower failed, or pure muscle memory took over and I unlocked the thing and shot a selfie without noticing, I lent the Meitu phone to an Android engineer as a test device.

A friend recommended a clip-on wide-angle lens and fill light for the phone, but they did nothing for the image quality of the iPhone's front camera, so the 50-yuan kit I'd bought on Xianyu got used exactly once before I listed it back on Xianyu.

The experiment started on a Monday. Over the weekend before it, I met up with several groups of people — after all, if I ended up taking a photo and wanted to post it to Moments, the photo had to be fit to be seen.

On Sunday night, a photographer friend showed me how to use the iPhone's own photo editor to pull various filter effects out of an image. It turned out that, spoiled by filter apps, I had no such self-sufficiency. I could shuffle back and forth through dozens of filters watching for tiny differences, but I had no patience at all for adjusting the contrast of each photo from scratch. (Maybe that's why some people become photographers and I remain, to this day, a feral self-taught selfie blogger.)

In the end I dug out the Sony mirrorless camera I hadn't carried in ages, charged it, put a card in it, and kept it in reserve.

Day one of the experiment had good weather

That sentence reads like a schoolchild's diary, but the biggest thing I learned in a week was a piece of common sense: light matters.

With plenty of light, a phone's rear camera can meet nearly every need you have for recording something. Turn on the grid, hold the phone level, nudge the exposure, and the photo is basically usable.

I took this on the way back from a business trip to Tianjin with a colleague. The weather was good and the sunset was beautiful, so I put the photo straight on Instagram. Normally, though, a casual snapshot can be more or less rescued by running it through a few apps, so the surprise that comes with weather like this doesn't feel as sharp.

Of course, a week later, back among my filter apps, I decided losing that surprise was no great loss.

With no beauty apps at all, you need a lot more backup

On day two, an occasion came up that called for a bit of makeup as a mark of respect. Before leaving the house I opened the camera out of habit and took a selfie. A basic wish to look good made me delete it.

Dark circles, freckles, an asymmetrical jaw, eyebrows I hadn't gotten around to trimming, powder caking on dry skin — none of it can hide from the front camera.

At a time when nearly every manufacturer treats beauty mode as a headline feature, Apple's front camera is an exception. Whether it's the Samsung C9 Pro at a little over 1,000 yuan or the OPPO and vivo phones at two or three thousand, they all blanket the country in ads for their selfie features. Turn on the TV or open a video app and there is no escaping them.

But open the iPhone's front camera and it teaches you to see yourself again, from the beginning — admit it, you're an ordinary person.

So I found I needed concealer, contour cream, highlighter, and a lot more time before I could arrive at a tolerable image of myself.

The photo on the left is the result of half an hour of makeup, fill light from an LED makeup mirror, and no fewer than thirty shots hunting for an angle, with the color finally adjusted in Apple's own editor. The photo on the right is my equipment: the fill-light mirror.

The photo on the left is also one of only two selfies I posted to Moments that week — I didn't have the nerve to go through all that again. I told myself the experiment was only a week; I could grit my teeth and get through it. But what if it went on forever? Once you're used to facing a beautified version of yourself, how do you live with the other one? Have I spent all these years held hostage by steadily improving beauty technology? Or am I deceiving my own eyes and brain on purpose, simply because a beautified photo will “vouch” for me?

The mirrorless camera I'd prepared never came out of the bag

On days three, four and five I went to Hangzhou for work. That expo, hosted by Taobao, came with an unexpected bonus: friends I'd made plans with several times and never managed to see all turned up there, by chance or by arrangement. At gatherings like that, a group selfie for Moments or Weibo is a standing item on the program, and given my skills, I'm usually the one who takes it.

I saw a lot of friends over those days, and because of the experiment, apart from recording scenes for work, I barely took any pictures at all, let alone selfies. All at once I noticed that when you remove the taking, swapping and editing of photos, there's more time left for talking. How much time that could have gone into real conversation normally gets spent maintaining a “good image” on social networks?

“Let's take a photo!”

Often that line is used as a way to break the ice, but at what point did the guest take the host's seat and become the main event?

As more and more of the city's influencer shops are designed to produce “Moments-friendly” photos, my friends and I have actually grown less willing to meet in such places. Everywhere you look there are people holding up phones; striking poses is tiring; and the fact that we're only talking and not shooting makes us look a bit odd. We might as well relax at home instead (though whatever we cook still gets one good glamour shot).

Even with the photo-editing apps off my phone, the mirrorless camera could have covered most of what I needed. But compared with a phone that's already in your hand, taking a camera out of your bag, switching it on, shooting, and then transferring the pictures to your phone doesn't take long — and yet it's more than a procrastinator's patience can bear.

On that trip I carried the mirrorless camera on my back for 20,000 steps a day and never once took it out.

On the last day of the experiment I found that even Apple couldn't resist a little beautifying

On the last day, a colleague reviewing the iPhone XS Max invited me to try it and, while I was at it, test what had changed in the front camera.

What had changed was this: is this an iPhone possessed by the spirit of Samsung?

The iPhone has never come with a built-in beauty effect, and the new one doesn't either, but photos from its front camera have a beautified look. This still comes down to adjustments in dynamic range: the whole image is brighter and the contrast between light and dark is gentler, which makes skin look soft and natural. It hasn't gone as far as smoothing skin and slimming faces, but it is an improvement on the iPhone X's “Shrek”-grade front camera.

The change has stirred up a great deal of argument lately over whether a front camera should come with beautification built in. Next to the ten-level beauty modes on domestic Android phones, Apple's slight improvement is small potatoes.

The YouTube unboxing blogger Lewis Hilsenteger argues that whether or not it counts as a beauty filter, the photos are distorted and the feature can't be switched off, which takes away the user's choice: “I don't care how amazing the neural network algorithms are, or the smart HDR, the facial analysis. The new features are great, but please give me an option to turn [these features] off.”

Honestly, I don't need that option. Or rather, it had never crossed my mind.

Do selfies make people feel better about themselves?

A study from Nottingham Trent University in Britain and the Thiagarajar School of Management in India confirmed that selfie addiction exists, and produced a scale for assessing selfie-addiction behavior:

1. Taking selfies makes me feel better and enjoy my surroundings more.

2. Sharing selfies creates healthy competition among my friends and colleagues.

3. Whenever I post a selfie I get a lot of likes on social media.

4. Taking selfies relieves my stress to some degree.

5. Selfies make me feel confident.

6. When I take selfies and share them on social media, I feel my peer group accepts me more.

7. Posting selfies makes it easier to express myself to the people around me.

8. Using different selfie poses helps raise my social status.

9. Sharing selfies makes me feel more popular.

10. Taking more selfies puts me in a better mood.

11. When I take selfies I think of myself more positively.

12. Posting selfies makes me an important member of my peer group.

13. Selfies help me remember a scene and an experience better.

14. I post selfies often, so I get more likes and comments on social media.

15. When I post a selfie I expect my friends to praise me.

16. Selfies adjust my mood at once.

17. I build my confidence by taking a lot of selfies and looking at them alone.

18. When I don't take selfies I feel cut off from my peer group.

19. I treat selfies as trophies to look back on.

20. I use photo-editing software to make myself look better than other people.

The Selfitis Behavior Scale (SBS) the researchers built contains 20 statements for self-assessment. Each is scored 1 to 5 by how strongly you agree — the more you agree, the higher the score — for a maximum of 100. You can measure yourself against it.

At the same time, other researchers still question whether it is wise to sum up a whole set of complicated human behaviors under one label. Labeling can be self-fulfilling: something that was no real problem ends up being called one.

When the photographer Juan I-Jong set up the Juan I-Jong Humanistic Photography Award, he wrote in its founding statement: “The essence of photography is discovery and record — that is, looking outward, finding the relationships among things, catching them, and passing their meaning on to more people.”

Since computers, digital cameras and phone photography spread, the technical bar for photography has become very low — but that has also led people to stop respecting their subjects, and to stop valuing the chance and the affinity behind pressing the shutter.

In a conversation with QDaily, Juan I-Jong said: “Phones are too convenient. The thing everyone is closest to, and faces most often, is the phone... Every time I see someone taking a selfie with a phone, I think how pitiful he is. I won't admire him; I'll feel sorry for him. How is it that he can't communicate with other people, and can't even find the best conversation with himself? Talking to a phone isn't a conversation. It's something done without thinking, by someone at a loss, someone who doesn't know what to do next or what to say next. But there's nothing to be done about it. All of us being lost together — that's a great pity.”

This week of experiment really did make me think about what “real” means.

Normally I refuse plastic surgery, and I refuse every kind of cosmetic procedure. Beyond being broke, the main reason is that I think dark circles, freckles, fine lines and loose skin are all part of the real me. I accept that person, and I live in peace with her.

But faced with the iPhone's front camera, which shows every real detail, I chose not to face it.

So the question becomes: is the self I accept the real one, or the one that filters and beauty apps have improved into something passable? Do I really care so little about how others see me and about other people's standards of beauty — or is it that photo-editing apps put my appearance close enough to those standards that I can accept the self who lives inside the apps?

What I aim for is editing that isn't excessive, so that at least when I meet online friends in person the scene isn't too awkward. But what counts as “not excessive”? The standard is in fact quite vague. As photo-editing apps improve and beauty algorithms advance, the results look more and more natural — but how far are we from “real”?

Cover image from Visualhunt