Perfect Selfie: Why Celebrities (and You) Favor the Left Side

Image: https://unsplash.com/photos/person-holding-smartphone-cYm25E81GMk

Have you ever wondered what your “working side” is for photos? Scientists believe that you are more likely to point to the left side of your face. The researchers trace this trend not only in pictures or selfies of famous people, but also in paintings from the 16th century.

The predominance of the left “working side” was first noticed in 1973, Nature writes. Then scientists from the University of Cambridge, Christopher McManus and Nicholas Humphrey, analyzed 1474 portraits of Western Europe dating from the 16th and 20th centuries. They found that 60% of people (891) were depicted with the left side of their face. Further research into this phenomenon showed that when posing for a portrait, people are more likely to show more of their left cheek when posing for the artist.

However, in self-portraits, the opposite was true - people were more willing to draw more of their right cheek. The researchers believe that the reason for this was that the artists created the work while looking at themselves in the mirror. So in fact, in self-portraits, the right cheek is depicted as the left. It's interesting how we see ourselves and how we want others to see us - a combination of many factors. Some people explain it according to biology, others use psychology tests, and others look for a connection with astrology. That's why there are databases of celebrity natal charts, such as pythia.guru/celebrity-birth-charts, where everyone can see similar relationships or create their own birth chart and analyze themselves.

But no matter how much you know yourself, you take selfies without thinking. That's why the left cheek trend has persisted in the digital age, when people have the opportunity to take photos with their smartphones more often. A 2015 PLOS study showed that in normal mode selfies, the left side of the face was more visible than the right. Instead, the mirror mode shifted the image to the right side, which is still the left cheek in a normal view.

In another research paper, scientists noticed that left-handed selfies received more likes and comments on Instagram than other photos. Moreover, the left-handedness bias even applied to pictures of chimpanzees.

Why Does Everyone Love the Left Cheek?

The fact that there is a tendency to show the left side in a portrait or photo has been established over the past 50 years, but the reason for this phenomenon has proven more difficult to determine. In their work, McManus and Humphrey proposed several potential explanations. One of them suggested that artists predominantly paint with their right hand, which is why they depict the left cheek in front.

The effect of the preference for the left side of the face in images persists even after selfies have replaced portraits in popularity. Scientists have also put forward another idea - people tend to find the left side of the face more attractive because it is under the control of the right hemisphere, which recognizes faces better.

The third hypothesis is that people turn their heads to the right more often. At the time of publication, there was not enough data to support either of these explanations.

In 2017, the journal Laterality published a study suggesting that people tend to express more emotion on the left side of the face. “Although we rarely realize it [...], facial expressions of emotion are asymmetrical: we tend to express more emotion on the left side of the face.”

Previous studies in adults have confirmed that the left cheek bias is not simply the result of an aesthetic (i.e., preference for portrait poses of the left cheek) or perceptual (perceived) bias,” the researchers say. In their opinion, the left cheek has greater anatomical prominence even in digitally processed images.