EXPERT SECRET | Find your best side? There's an App for that

SURE, YOU can look in the mirror and try to discern which side of your face is more flattering in pictures. We all have a good and bad side.

Most of us do, at least.

Some won't. Sorry about that. Tis life. And genetics. But, like Wallis Simpson, Willem Defoe or Rosy de Palma, we're sure you'll work whatcha got, right? Do the interesting thing instead of the mainstream attractive thing. 

It's not vain.

Okay, it is.

But it's true.

We want to look good in pictures.  Mostly, I want to look good in pictures so that when I'm old and wrinkly with boobs getting tangled around my knees, I can look at my pictures from younger days and be like "would you look at that, granddaughter/grandson/herd of cats... grandma wasn't half bad in her day. Sure, she had a droopy right eyelid, a nose that was whacked out of line in a hockey match... possibly Rene Zellweger cheeks and a rather short neck but, hell, it all seems to work okay together. In any event, it's hotter than wrinkly grandma is now", or something along those lines.

You surely want the same.

Don't lie.

I know you do, if the number of pictures you post of yourself on Facebook has anything to say about it.

Yes, anyone with pictures numbering in the hundreds on Facebook likes to look at themselves.

Fact.

Anyway, you'll look loads hotter (or interesting, if you lost the genetic lottery) in those pictures if you figure out which is your hot side vs the fugly side. The solution is simple. In fact, dare I say... there's (now) an App for that? Cuz there is.

It's Echoism.org and it let's you snap a pic of your face and then mirrors both halves to create a whole face from each half of your face. Two yous! Sweet. Because one wasn't enough, right.

Why?

Because apparently symmetrical faces are hotter than asymmetrical ones. Mainly it's a good time because it doesn't work correctly. You end up looking more like the reflection in a fun house mirror than exact full-facial glamour shots of your two halves but whatevs. That might even work for the interesting types.

The trick to using it right is actually getting a picture with your god-forsaken iPhone that isn't wobbly, fish-eyed or featuring uneven halves of your face.

Good f-ing luck. 

I had an impossible time of it but see that some people on the site made a better go of it than I did. Might I suggest the webcam on your computer instead?

Also, there should be an option to NOT upload your pics to the website if you don't want to! For now, if you take a pic and decide to keep it, it automatically gets posted to Echoism.org.

For the design savvy, I suggest a DIY version of this. Snap a pic -- or use one of the hundreds on your Facebook profile, open it in Fireworks or some other imaging program, slice it in half, copy the halves and then mirror them to their parent halves. Same thing as Echoism.org but with more accuracy. And private.

Like this (a makeup-free me):

Top pick is just a makeup-free me one fine morning. Below it's bloody Jekyll and Hyde. I'm as asymmetrical as they come. It's two different people but smooshed together they equal me. Personally I dig the evil left me better.

Do you have a best side? Or are you perfect like Denzel? 

FROM THE FRONT | Maybelline NYC365

WHADDYA THINK of Maybelline's new street style micro-site? Pretty bold move for a corporate beauty brand, in my book. I think I'm a fan.

Check out Maybelline NYC365 yourself.

Just say no to DUCKFACE (or your face will stay that way)

Facial expressions in photography change with the times, don't they? My stoic great great grandparents look like ghostly pod people (post-life force sucked out of them a la The Dark Crystal). Immovable as statues, their faces were drawn into fixed stares. Not a wandering eye or disobedient child in sight... just utter, eerie stillness.

Slowly during the twentieth century, the smile crept into photography, notably the ginormous toothy (top and bottom, baby) grin that so demarcates an American in any photo. Even models started smiling after a time (Christie and Cheryl, you were pillars of wholesome American beauty). Anyway, things seemed to be progressing (transgressing is more like it) in a certain manner over the last 15 or so years into the realm of the patently ridiculous. We now pose for pictures in a way that would have had Dali himself in peals of laughter.

We've taken the pout into the silly stratosphere, producing what can only be referred to as Duckface because the lips are pushed out in such an exaggerated manner as to mimic the beak of Daffy Duck himself. And daffy it is.

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