Selfies can damage your credibility

A Herald story, under the headline Selfies can damage your health

Dermatologists now believe that regularly exposing the face to the light and electromagnetic radiation from smartphones can speed up ageing and wrinkles.

The people making that claim don’t seem to be giving any evidence. You’d need a lot of evidence to believe a claim like that, given how much more light and electromagnetic radiation we get from the sun. Sure, sunlight doesn’t have quite the same frequency spectrum, but it’s so much brighter that it will be giving you more exposure at any frequency.

Also, when you’re taking selfies, your phone is usually not particularly close to your face.  After all, that’s why selfie sticks were invented. If the claim were true, the real message would be that selfies protect your health.

Doctors even claim they can tell which hand a person holds their phone in just by looking at which side of the face is most damaged.

I have no real doubt that this doctor can tell which hands his patients hold their phones in — for example, by observing what hand they use for other things, or what pocket the phone is kept in.  But, again, people nowadays don’t spend much time holding their phones up to one side of their faces. You only do that for phone calls, and only then if you don’t have a headset, and that’s such a twentieth century way to use a phone.

And, yes, the people involved are all selling something.

(This story comes from the Daily Telegraph, though it didn’t say so when I first read it, and according to a credible witness it said Daily Mail earlier)