Styles / Digital & social
Meitu beauty-app selfie
- Window: a large soft source, 180 × 160 cm, 1.7 m from the face, straight in front, 22 cm above the eyes.
To scale, from the render’s scene file. One way to get this light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.
Rendered with this plan. A bright window straight in front, the face turned into it so the shadows almost vanish, the phone held close and a little above.
Render: a synthetic clay head made with MakeHuman, not a person, in Blender Cycles, 42 mm, f/8.
BeautyPlus app filter~ I especially like that fact that they have diverse skin tone filters.
MikuMarmalade, BeautyPlus app filter, 2017. CC BY 2.0, via Flickr. Source: BeautyPlus app filter~ I especially like that fact that they have diverse skin tone filters. at Flickr
Self-portraits taken with a phone's front camera (in the early 2010s, also a selfie compact) and run through a beauty app such as Meitu's, which edits the face itself: skin smoothed, lightened and flushed pink, dark circles and blemishes erased, eyes enlarged and brightened, jaw and chin narrowed. The light is bright and nearly shadowless, from a window, a screen or now and then a ring light; the camera is held close and a little above; colour is pale and pastel with a soft glow, often finished with stickers, frames and the app's watermark, and posted to a feed.
How the look is made
- Turn the camera on yourself, with a phone's front camera or a compact's swivelling screen, and hold it close and a little above eye level, so the face fills the frame and the chin narrows.
- Face a window, a bright screen or a ring light so the light falls from the front and leaves almost no shadow, then push the exposure bright.
- Edit the face, not only the frame, as far as the sitter chooses: smooth and even the skin, remove dark circles and blemishes, enlarge and brighten the eyes, slim the jaw and chin.
- Grade soft and pastel: a glow over the highlights, pale pink, lilac and sky-blue colour in the background and clothes, flushed cheeks and lips, and no grain, noise or other trace of the camera; keep the sitter's own skin tone rather than lightening it.
- Finish with stickers, a frame or a caption, and post the picture to a feed in a tall or square frame; found pictures often carry the app's watermark, but never add a real app's watermark or logo to a new or generated picture.
Shoot sheet for your kit
Fill in your camera, lenses and lights, and the sheet says which light plays each part, what to work around and where to start on your camera. Without a kit it starts on a full-frame camera.
Light
Key: a window, about 25° to the camera’s left, soft.
Fill: a softbox, about 25° to the camera’s right, high, soft.
Background light: a softbox, from behind the subject, soft.
- Open shadows: bright surroundings (walls, ground, sky) fill them; no reflector needed.
- Shadowless: big sources close in on both sides (or a light tent, or a white cove) so nothing casts a shadow.
- Shadow edges
- Light from all around, so almost no shadows form even under the chin or behind objects: a white cove, a light tent, a large ring light, fog over snow. Shadows that fade gradually from light to dark, cast by a large or diffused light: a window, a softbox, a cloudy sky.
- Shadow depth
- Shadows kept light and full of detail by a reflector, a fill light, bounce or bright surroundings (a low lighting ratio, up to about 3:1: the shadow side at most a stop and a half darker).
- Shape & form
- Light from the camera’s own position (an on-camera flash, a ring light, a frontal softbox) fills every hollow, so faces and objects look flat, with little shape.
- Highlights
- The brightest parts burn out to pure white with no detail, on purpose or because the light was too strong. Bright, clearly shaped reflections of the light in the eyes (a window, a ring, a softbox), made a feature of the portrait.
How the style is lit
- Bright frontal window light or open shade, the face turned to the light so that shadows almost vanish.
- Now and then a ring light around the phone, or the glow of a screen, for evening selfies and livestreams, leaving ring-shaped catchlights.
- The app's or camera's beauty mode then lifts the exposure and softens whatever shadow is left on the face.
This plan is worked out from the style’s choices, so it is drawn as a schematic. The set-up at the top of the page is the one we rendered, to scale. One way to get the light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.
Lens and settings
Start at
On a full-frame camera: the same depth of field and exposure as the style’s own numbers, in the same light. Then meter and adjust.
- The style’s f/2.4 on a phone gives about the depth of field of f/12 on full frame.
- 1/4 s: on a tripod.
- Then
- 21–32 mm · f/2–f/2.8 · 1/125–1/30 s · ISO 50–400 on a phone, documented. Front cameras of about 28–32 mm equivalent at f/2.0–2.2 (iPhone 6s 31 mm f/2.2; Meitu phones f/2.0) and Casio's TR100 selfie compact at 21 mm f/2.8, held at arm's length; indoor exposures near 1/30 s at ISO 200 (specimen EXIF).
- White balance
- Phone auto white balance, then the beauty app flushes skin pink and grades the background pale and pastel, so lamp and window tints rarely survive (inferred).
- Focus
- A soft glow around highlights; edges never quite sharp.
- Angle
- Looking down on the subject.
- Distance
- Within arm’s reach: faces, hands and details fill the frame.
- The photographer
- The camera held at arm’s length, often turned on oneself.
- Balance
- The subject in the middle, the frame balanced around it.
- Crop & fill
- The edges cut into the subject: heads, limbs or objects run out of frame.
Direct
Self-directed at arm's length: shoulders square or slightly turned, head tilted, chin dipped and eyes looking up into a lens held a little above; a small closed smile, a slight pout or wide eyes; a hand at the cheek or a V sign; the face turned to the light. Friends squeeze in cheek to cheek for group selfies.
- Turn to the camera
- Shoulders and hips face the lens straight on: direct, symmetrical, sometimes confrontational.
- Head & gaze
- Looking straight into the camera, so the subject meets the viewer’s eye. The head canted to one side: softer, curious, playful or cute. The chin dropped and the eyes lifted to the lens: a coy or intense look, typical of selfies and beauty shots.
- Arms & hands
- Signs made at the camera: the V sign, heart hands, finger hearts, a thumbs-up, pointing at the lens.
- Expression
- A smile, posed or natural, lips closed or showing teeth. Pouts, puffed cheeks, wide eyes, tongues out and other faces pulled for the camera.
- The moment
- Ordinary photographs by and for ordinary people, or images that look like them.
- With the sitter
- The subject performs for the camera and shapes the picture.
Style the set
Everyday clothes, often in soft pinks and pastels, with the sitter's own groomed hair and make-up (even skin, defined eyes, glossy lips), sometimes a bolder look or a wig; a few touches straightened before the shot, and the room, café or street behind left as it is and washed out to white.
- Hair & make-up
- Groomed hair and finished make-up that still look natural: even skin, defined eyes, neat brows.
- How much is styled
- A few small touches (a tidied table, a straightened collar, a chosen outfit) that still look unplanned.
Finish
- Colour
- Pale, light colours.
- Digital & other
- A phone camera and its processing: deep focus, bright shadows, synthetic blur.
- Texture
- Smooth tones with no visible grain.
- Post-production
- Perfected skin and surfaces. A ready-made grade laid over the whole image. Words or graphic marks added to the photograph.
- Shown in
- Pictures made for a scrolling feed.
- Frame
- A tall frame made for phones and screens.
Stay away from low-key & chiaroscuro, hard, direct sun, raking side light, direct on-camera flash, visible grain, hyper-detailed, straight print, candid & unobserved, high-contrast black & white, hard-edged shadows, black shadows, split light and awkward & in-between.
Before you shoot it
These are real people's faces, many of them young women and teenagers, and the look has been criticised for narrowing beauty to one template: lighter skin, big eyes with double eyelids, a slim pointed chin and a narrow, high-bridged nose, features critics read as Eurocentric. Asked in 2021 whether Meitu Xiuxiu was 'unifying everyone's aesthetics', Meitu's founder Wu Xinhong conceded that there may once have been such a standard, the so-called internet-celebrity face, while saying the app now makes beauty 'more open and inclusive'; people have taken Meitu-edited photos to plastic surgeons, and beauty filters have been linked to body dysmorphic disorder; one BeautyPlus user, praising its new skin-tone options, wrote: 'Prior I'd get my bubbly eyes and look 5 shades lighter in the process'. Never lighten skin or reshape features by default: retouch every skin tone on its own terms and let the sitter decide what changes. Meitu, BeautyCam and BeautyPlus are a company's trademarks, not free style labels.
Photographs that define it
From open collections, shown whole with their credits. Later photographs are linked, not shown, while they are in copyright.
紀艾希 Ring
ChenTim0602, 紀艾希 Ring, 2017. CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr and Wikimedia Commons. Source: 紀艾希 Ring at Wikimedia Commons (from Flickr)
In copyright, so linked
- #Meitu #Gruppenzwang #AppDesTages #FürJedenQuatschZuHaben , Sebastian Schack (iSchack), 2017-01-19. Flickr.
With other styles
The opposite: Hollywood glamour portraiture. Both perfect the face by retouching, but the studio carved it with a hard spotlight on a dark ground while the beauty app floods it with shadowless light and reshapes it automatically; borrow a single key light when a beauty-app portrait looks flat.
Pairs with Light and airy. Both want bright, pastel, high-key pictures; for a gentler version of the beauty look, use light-and-airy's backlit daylight and real lens blur, and leave the shape of the face alone.
The opposite: VSCO film-preset look. The film preset fades the whole frame and leaves the face as it is; the beauty app keeps colour bright and changes the face, so do not stack a faded film grade on a beautified selfie.
The opposite: Y2K digicam and flash revival. The digicam look shows off the camera's flash glare, noise and blur; the beauty camera hides every trace of the camera, so pick one and brief the client on which.
The opposite: Girly photo (onnanoko shashin). The girly-photo self-portraits of 1990s Japan kept skin, flash glare and film grain as they were; use them as the unedited counter-model when a self-portrait should look like its sitter.
Sources
- Margaret Hillenbrand and Xuenan Cao, 'Facial AI: Cosmetic Surgery in China and the Death of Internets Everywhere', Grey Room 103 (Spring 2026), pp. 102–116, https://doi.org/10.1162/GREY.a.368, read at https://www.greyroom.org/media/files/hillenbrand-cao.pdf (wanghonglian defined by Baidu Baike in 2017 as a standardised face with a pointed chin, European double eyelids and a high-bridged nose; Meitu Xiuxiu launched October 2008, one-tap filters and skin whitening, 'old-school Hollywood glamour available via a single button'; Meitu's mobile app of 2011 and its face slimming, jaw narrowing and eye enlargement; the authors' reading of Wu Xinhong's 2021 Daily Economic News interview; Instagram face filters, 16 May 2017)
- Liu Chunshan and Han Yang, 'Meitu xiuxiu zai tongyi dajia de shenmei? Meitu chuangshiren Wu Xinhong: "Wanghonglian" yijing jinhua cheng "qianren qianmian"', Daily Economic News (Meiri jingji xinwen), 31 August 2021: https://www.nbd.com.cn/articles/2021-08-31/1898311.html (asked whether Meitu Xiuxiu was unifying everyone's aesthetic standards, Wu Xinhong said such a standard, the wanghong face, may once have existed, and that the app now makes aesthetics more open and inclusive)
- Meitu, company introduction and history: https://www.meitu.com/hk/introduction (founded 2008; founder, chairman and CEO Wu Xinhong; MT Lab 2010; BeautyCam and BeautyPlus launched 2013; listed in Hong Kong 2016)
- Meitu, 'Meitu Internationalization in 2018: AirBrush and BeautyPlus Profitable, Overseas Users of the Meitu App Increased Drastically', press release, 25 December 2018: https://www.meitu.com/en/media/266 (the Meitu app 'has also become popular in the Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, and Mongolian markets'; monthly active users up 53% in Indonesia, 44% in Vietnam and 9% in Thailand; BeautyPlus 'the overseas version of BeautyCam'; a company's own figures)
- MeituPic, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeituPic (Meitu Xiu Xiu, 美图秀秀; its PC version created in 2008 by Wu Xinhong; its mobile version one of the first must-have mobile apps in China in 2013; automatic retouch 'lightening the skin tone, brightening the eyes'; slimming and frames; mostly used in mainland China, popular in Hong Kong and Taiwan)
- Meitu, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meitu (established 2008, headquartered in Xiamen, Fujian; Meitu-edited photos taken to plastic surgeons as a model; cites Jiayang Fan, 'China's Selfie Obsession', The New Yorker, December 2017, not read directly)
- The World staff, 'Is one selfie app company changing beauty standards in China?', PRI's The World, 28 December 2017: https://www.wgbh.org/news/2017-12-28/is-one-selfie-app-company-changing-beauty-standards-in-china (after Jiayang Fan in The New Yorker: more than half of the selfies uploaded on Chinese social media believed edited with one company's apps; the look named wang hong lian; users brighten their eyes and sharpen their chin; plastic surgery to achieve the look)
- Selfie culture on Chinese social media, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selfie_culture_on_Chinese_social_media (MeituKiss of May 2013 with an automated beauty enhancement feature and a selfie button, citing 36Kr, 30 April 2013; BeautyCam (美颜相机) 138 million installations; mainstream filters seek 'smooth and flawless skin, slim chins and shiny big eyes', dark circles and wrinkles eliminated; Vivo's selfie phones; the August 2019 livestream whose filter failed)
- Beauty filter, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty_filter (purikura of 1995 as forerunner; the iPhone 4 of 2010, the first iPhone with a front camera, and the rise in selfies; Snapchat's lenses, September 2015; effects include smoothing skin, slimming the face, enlarging the eyes and narrowing the nose; filters highlight Eurocentric features; linked to body dysmorphic disorder; the retouching applied by TikTok's default front camera in 2021; TikTok's Bold Glamour filter, March 2023)
- Purikura, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purikura (Print Club introduced by Sega and Atlus in February 1995; brightening pictures, making the eyes sparkle, blurring blemishes; backdrops, borders, decorations and text)
- A. W. Ohlheiser, 'TikTok changed the shape of some people's faces without asking', MIT Technology Review, 10 June 2021: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/10/1026074/tiktok-mandatory-beauty-filter-bug/ (late May 2021, a slimmer jaw and possibly softer skin in TikTok's camera on Android, which TikTok called an issue that had been resolved; a Douyin user who still saw her face adjusted with the beauty mode and filters turned off; in China and some other places some apps add a subtle beauty filter by default)
- 'Casio Exilim EX-TR150', Photography Blog, 16 May 2012, from Casio's press release of 16 March 2012: https://www.photographyblog.com/news/casio_exilim_ex-tr150 (the TR100's variable frame for self-portraits kept; new Make-up mode that 'applies effects to smooth skin and soften facial shadows caused by harsh light')
- 'Casio EX-TR10 & EX-TR15', Photography Blog, 12 July 2013, from Casio's press release of 19 June 2013: https://www.photographyblog.com/news/casio_ex_tr10_ex_tr15 (360° rotating frame, 270° rotating display, a self-portrait shutter button on the frame; 12 selectable make-up levels)
- ansel, '貴在「Emotional Value」︰Casio 設計師談 TR50 自拍神器', DCFever, 9 November 2014: https://www.dcfever.com/news/readnews.php?id=11875 (the first TR100 of 2011 made its name in Hong Kong, then was taken up by women users in mainland China and Taiwan and called the 'selfie wonder-tool', zipai shenqi, which Casio had not foreseen)
- Huang Longzhong, '拜访 CASIO 日本总部：卡片机是否走向消亡？', iFanr, 3 September 2013: https://www.ifanr.com/340144 (Casio launched the TR series in 2011; in China its self-portrait function was discovered by women users and became the most popular)
- 美顏 (měiyán), Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/美顏 (simplified 美颜; 'beautiful or beautified face', and as a verb, to beautify one's face)
- Runhua Zhao, 'Meitu faces up to natural look', TechNode, 7 November 2018: https://technode.com/2018/11/07/meitu-faces-up-to-natural-look/ (the wanghong look of 'very big eyes, very thin face'; users shifting to a more natural standard; Meitu Xiuxiu and BeautyCam; monthly active users 415.8 million at the end of 2017)
- Catherine Lai, 'Popular Chinese Selfie App Meitu Prompts Privacy Fears', Hong Kong Free Press, 22 January 2017, republished by Global Voices, 24 January 2017: https://globalvoices.org/2017/01/24/popular-chinese-selfie-app-meitu-prompts-privacy-fears/ (the app, launched in 2008, took off in the West after people shared photographs transformed into anime-like images)
- MikuMarmalade, 'BeautyPlus app filter~ …', Flickr, 11 April 2017: https://www.flickr.com/photos/52244076@N06/33139908834 (a user's praise of BeautyPlus's diverse skin-tone filters, and of getting 'bubbly eyes' and looking '5 shades lighter' with the filters before them)
- Apple iPhone 6s full specifications, GSMArena: https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_6s-7242.php (selfie camera 5 MP, f/2.2, 31 mm equivalent)
- Apple iPhone 7 full specifications, GSMArena: https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_7-8064.php (selfie camera 7 MP, f/2.2, 32 mm equivalent)
- 美圖手機 2 (Meitu 2) specifications, SOGI: https://www.sogi.com.tw/products/meitu_2/11078 (launched August 2014; 13 MP front and rear cameras, F2.0 and 28 mm wide-angle given for the dual-camera lens, front fill light)
- Casio Exilim Tryx EX-TR100 review, Amateur Photographer, 9 July 2011: https://amateurphotographer.com/review/casio-exilim-tryx-ex-tr100 ('a fixed 21mm (35mm equivalent) f/2.8' lens, 1/2.3-inch 12.1 MP sensor, ISO 100–3200)
- 紀艾希 Ring, ChenTim0602, Wikimedia Commons (EXIF): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%E7%B4%80%E8%89%BE%E5%B8%8C_Ring.jpg (Meitu 2 at 3.5 mm, f/2.0, 1/30 s, ISO 200)