Yahoo Lifestyle Me, My Selfie And I - Could You Take The Kim Kardashian Challenge?
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Like many terrible realisations, it all happened in a changing room. I was trying on a dress that looked good on the rack – silk, summery, a soft fawn colour with a tie waist. But when I put it on it clashed with my skin, giving my face an unflattering pink glow.
“Never mind,” I thought to myself, appraising my reflection with a steely editor’s eye. “I can fix up the colour with an Instagram filter.” That’s when I knew that my assignment – to selfie myself for a week at the same rate as the patron saint of selfies, Kim Kardashian – had started to go off the rails.
Let us consider the selfie. The word was almost unheard of a few years ago but has now earned a place in the Oxford English Dictionary. According to Google’s analytics, we take more than 93 million selfies every day, which is 326 times the rate at which we have orgasms. Kardashian, the world’s uncontested selfie grande dame, once described them as “the purpose of life” on her reality show, Keeping Up With The Kardashians. She wasn’t kidding. The 34-year-old wife of Kanye West and mother to 23-month-old daughter North is reported to take up to 1200 selfies a day. That’s 100 selfies an hour over 12 hours, or one selfie every 36 seconds that she’s awake. “How on earth does she have time to do anything else?” you may ask. I’ll tell you right now: she doesn’t.
Kardashian has even hired a “selfie editor” to advise her on lighting and angles and decide which of her hundreds of self-portraits will make it onto social media. She has also single-handedly invented a sub-genre of selfie, the butt selfie or “belfie”, and is said to make millions of dollars via selfie product placement from the cosmetic and alcohol companies she endorses. Because Kardashian is truly the world’s most prolific 360-degree, 365-days-a-year, walking, talking, pouting brand, it’s hard to know where the selfies stop and the woman starts. If aliens landed on Earth tomorrow, imagine trying to explain to them that this is a genuine way a member of our species makes a living.
On May 5, Kardashian is releasing Selfish (Rizzoli, $29.95), a 448-page book of her own selfies produced by a luxury New York publishing house – just in case you are, in fact, an alien and haven’t discovered the hundreds of other media channels where you can already view this woman’s photographic meditations on herself for free.
If not a sure sign of the coming apocalypse, the book’s release is certainly a good argument for the idea that we’ve reached Peak Selfie. Add the rising popularity of the selfie stick (aka the Wand of Narcissism), the fact that a UK college is offering a course in “taking the perfect selfie”, and statistics unearthed by The Body Shop that say the average woman spends 753 hours of her life capturing the perfect online profile picture, and it’s easy to assume our digital lives are beginning to trump our flesh-and-blood lives.
But are selfies making us more narcissistic? Or is our increasing narcissism making us take more selfies? US researcher Dr Jean Twenge from San Diego University analysed data from 11 million young people across 20 years, and found that we’re significantly more narcissistic than we were a decade ago. The selfie, it could be argued, is merely symptomatic of this; narcissism’s business card, if you like.
Other experts believe that selfies are not in and of themselves problematic. “It’s not necessarily narcissistic to explore your own perspective of yourself visually – look at the history of self-portraits,” says Associate Professor Doris McIlwain of Sydney’s Macquarie University. The problem, she says, lies with the kind of selfies we create. If you’re gilding the lily (read: obsessing over filters and lighting), you may be far more interested in showing off than showing your true self. “These activities become narcissistic if you hide what you see as your bad bits and if it is all about you, no matter what the context.”
To explore what really goes into making selfies round the clock, and to see whether I turn into a vain, preening nightmare (plus quite possibly just to torture me for their own amusement), the editors at marie claire issued me with this challenge: spend a week taking selfies of yourself – à la Kim Kardashian – and see what it does to your life. The results, despite blood, sweat, tears and a lifesaving retouching app, were not pretty ...
To see what happened next, pick up our May issue with Kate Hudson on the cover, on sale now.
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