Courtesy Of Your Favorite Selfie-Taking Celebs

By now, you’ve heard that “selfie” is 2013’s word of the year, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. And since we know you’d never want to miss out on a trend, we assume you’re furiously practicing your duck face in front of the mirror to really maximize the selfie’s white-hot relevance at the moment. Not so fast, though: There are a few key pointers you’ll want to follow to make sure that your selfies are more Beyoncé’s gorgeous pixie reveal and less Martha Stewart’s food-stagrams. Celeb photographer and Smashbox founder Davis Factor and Smashbox Pro Lead Artist Lori Taylor Davis give us tips, and we pulled celeb selfies to illustrate.

“Lighting is essential when it comes to the perfect selfie,” Factor says. If you’re shooting outside, “a bright day can create shadows on your face, so you will want to find the most natural light to add brightness to your face as well as body.” Miranda Kerr seems to have picked up that tip, letting her face be illuminated by the sun at such an angle as to blur any lines or imperfections.

“If you are looking for more light indoors, I would suggest using a flash,” Factor says. “Most camera phone flashes can only reach so far, so play around and see how far it can go.” Miley Cyrus is not following this advice — without the proper flash, her features are washed out and her skin doesn’t look bright.

“Always remember: when facing the camera straight on you will be shown at your widest, try and turn away from the camera at an angle to create a natural pose,” says Factor. Clearly Kim Kardashian got this memo a while ago.

Both Factor and Davis advise trying to look natural and confident — by not applying too much makeup and by opting for a natural mid-laugh smile rather than a cheesy, gummy smile or duck lips. Tyra Banks nails “confident,” though we don’t know about natural.

“Make sure that your foundation or BB Cream matches your skin tone,” Davis says — her favorite is Smashbox’s Liquid Halo HD Foundation which blends with your skin rather than sitting on top of it. Katy Perry‘s flawlessly blended base would get high marks here, though Davis probably would advise a little more blush to counteract the “ghost” effect from a bright flash.

How to Take Best Selfie on Social Media

If you’ve been living in a tent on the tundra or under a rock in your backyard, you may not have heard the term “selfie.” In your defense, the term itself isn’t really that old – it was coined in 2005 as a way to describe a special kind of self-portrait. A selfie isn’t usually a carefully composed image of the photographer in his studio, taken with a tripod mounted camera on the timer setting (though it can be). “Selfie” usually refers to an image that is much more informal that that, generally taken with a digital camera or smart phone held at arm’s length, snapped on the fly and usually destined for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or some other form of social media.

Now you know what a Selfie is, but have you even taken a good one?

Now, I’m pretty sure everyone has taken one, even if it never left your hard drive. Now that smart phones have that great flip button that allows you to see exactly what you’re going to look like in a self-taken photograph, it’s hard to resist the temptation. And the selfie itself (minus its comparatively young moniker) is actually almost as old as photography. Before the advent of that little flip button photographers took selfies by cleverly positioning their cameras in a discrete (or sometimes indiscrete) location and then photographing their reflection in a mirror. Today’s cameras make this process a lot easier, and the prevalence of social media makes it almost a requirement to have at least one selfie you can use to mark your online territory.

So now that you know what I mean you may be thinking about all your friend’s selfies on their Facebook pages and realizing what a challenging little sub-genre this actually is. Because you’ve probably seen more bad selfies than good ones. And some of your friends may over-selfie to the point where you’d kind of like to just block them.

Taking a good selfie is an art. What’s more, knowing how many selfies to post and which selfies to use on what social media platform is a much higher form of art. Because selfies can be annoying to others, they can paint you as an egomaniac and they can just plain put people off. In fact, a 2013 study by the University of Birmingham discovered that posting too many selfies on Facebook was strongly correlated with “lower levels of social support and intimacy”. And yet, among people aged 18 to 24, selfies account for a whopping 30% of all the photos they take.