Suffering from chin chagrin
So I’m sitting in the edit room looking down at my phone. To my right is our bright, helpful intern Claire, who is looking down at her phone, too. And as I look at her profile, I wonder:
How many chins does she see in her phone? Because I just looked down at my phone and I saw three chins.
For all the technological brilliance of smartphones, why hasn’t that one flaw been fixed? There’s something in the glass on the face of phones that multiplies chins.
It’s bad enough when the phone is off and I’m looking down at it. But the real horror came the time I turned the camera on and reversed it to selfie direction and lowered the camera to shoulder level and aimed it upward. The screen filled with sub-facial blubber, removing my neck and turning me into a blobfish.
Of course, this is largely a problem of angle and perspective. If I take a snapshot of my face from under my chin, it’s going to be mostly chin. It’s one of the first things I learned as a young television reporter: never allow the camera person to aim up at you. The camera should be eye level or higher. Any model will tell you that being photogenic is mostly about working the angles.
Granted, things have relaxed a bit in my chinular and neck region these last few years. When I read “I Feel Bad about My Neck,” the funny book by the late Nora Ephron, I was young enough to laugh at it from an observer’s perspective. Now, I am hesitant to pull it off the shelf and open it again because it will just hit too close to home.
There is no excuse for bad, chin-centric photos any more. Filters and apps remove wrinkles, lift cheekbones, widen eyes and, if you want, give you cute little bunny noses and ears. What I need is an app that will remove extra chins. Or, at least the phone makers could give me something nontechnical, such as making the smartphone glass nonreflective, so I won’t have to see myself from that angle.
And maybe it’s not just the mirror that’s giving us extra chins. There’s something called “tech neck,” which describes the wrinkles and sagging that come from years and years of looking downward, at phones and tablets and laptops. As I’m writing this, my laptop is perched on my knees as I recline on the sofa. My chin is touching my collarbone. Oh, the damage I must be doing.
There in the edit room, I thought about asking Claire to count her chins in her phone screen, but that would be creepy. Besides, she is all of 22 years old. How bad could it be, no matter the angle of the phone?
So come on you young coders. Invent an app that will make me feel less bad about my neck and my chin. You could call it something like “Un-Chin-Me,” or “Slim Chin.” Even better, “Chin Up.”
I would download it right now.
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.