I like how I look in the mirror, but I hate how I look on camera. Does anyone else experience this?

It's a common psychological phenomenon, and it happens to more people than you think. It's known as the mere-exposure effect: people develop a preference for things they see more often. In your case, as with many others, you see your reflection a lot and grow to prefer it to other representations of yourself.

Also, it's a well-known fact that averages are more attractive. No, this doesn't mean that average looking people are beautiful - what it means that, if you take a bunch of peoples' images, create a composite from those images, that composite will likely be judged as more attractive than any of the individual pictures that make up the composite.

So when you see your face in the mirror (or in a video), your brain is automatically doing this averaging: each frame your eyes see is averaged with the past frames and goes on to be averaged with future frames. In short, people look better in motion than they do in still pictures.

/r/TheGirlSurvivalGuide Thread