Being Unphotogenic

This cat is more photogenic than me

Being unphotogenic is pretty complicated.

The pictures I take of myself are pretty decent, I guess, but when it comes to other people taking pictures of me, everything becomes a mess, I swear to God. I was looking at my tagged pictures on Facebook the other day, and let's just say the discrepancy between how I look in my profile pictures and how I looked in those tagged pictures was almost embarrassing... Yes, I shamelessly type "how to be photogenic" in the Google search bar sometimes, but every single time I keep getting results that go, "Just practice! That is the best way!"

Um, yeah, most of that is vague bullpoop. For one thing, I really don't have the social life to practice smiling into other people's cameras. Second, I've "practiced" smiling many times with 50+ selca attempts in one go and I still don't know how to smile decently in public.

The other thing I see a lot: "Smile naturally! A natural smile is the best smile!!!!!"

Jung Eun-ji from APink ♥
I envy her smile :( Can I steal it

Sure, it's true that a person looks a lot nicer and more relaxed when they smile naturally, but when I smile naturally, as the Cantonese saying goes, “笑到见牙不见眼”, you see my teeth but not my eyes... in a bad way. I get chinky eyes, wacky, asymmetrical cheeks, and a face that looks as if I'm facing an internal struggle (which I technically am). And by chinky I don't mean the cute kind of chinky that I see in Asian celebrities or in my other Asian friends, when their eyes form little perfect crescent moons. Nope. Not even.

This is why I hate the last days of school. If I see someone popping up in front of me with a camera that has no front camera, my instinct is to scream bloody murder and run away into a dark cave. Even if I feel it in my bones that maybe I can make a good picture that time, the picture ultimately comes out the same: the other people in the picture look absolutely fabulous while I look like an out of place, awkward, and stiff potato who doesn't know what to do with her hands.

I already know that the key to looking nice in photos is being confident, but uh, it's not exactly easy for me to be confident when all the pictures I've taken before had came out atrociously o_o

But strangely enough, I'm more relaxed and smile nicely when I'm looking in the bathroom mirror and when I'm using a webcam... well, I guess it's because I can see myself so I know how to pose... but if I could be like that in public too, that would be nice. (It's the twenty-first century; why can't they create mirror cameras? That would solve a lot of my problems.)

Well, here's a short, random Asian eye-smile appreciation section to end this post off:

Hyuk from VIXX ♥ (my love)

Baekhyun from EXO ♥

So cute :(