There's an insidious element present even at the optical hardware level: the limited arms-length distance necessitates wide-angle lenses, which exaggerates the

There's an insidious element present even at the optical hardware level: the limited arms-length distance necessitates wide-angle lenses, which exaggerates the foreground elements and caused an uptick of people thinking their noses were bigger than they "actually" are (at typical viewing distances with our own organic eyeballs) [1]. Perhaps the aggressive smoothing is an attempt to rectify this, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's some automatic computational photography pincushion warping to compensate for the larger-than-reality nose effect. I sometimes ponder over the alternate timeline where front-facing cameras selfie cams were never invented. [1] https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/3/1/17059566/plastic-surgery-selfie-distortion https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/3/1/17059566/pla...