The MySpace Angle and the Mirror Selfie

Chin down, eyes up, one arm stretched as high as it would go: that was the MySpace angle, and the little click usually led to a second try. It was a selfie taken with the camera held high above your head at arm's length, tilted down so your face looks bigger and the rest of you shrinks. It was the classic profile picture of the mid-2000s, right next to the mirror selfie, where you pointed a digital camera or flip phone at a bathroom mirror. Phones didn't get front-facing cameras for video calls until the iPhone 4 in 2010, so taking your own picture took some creativity. By 2013 the word "selfie" was so common that Oxford Dictionaries named it the Word of the Year.

What is the MySpace angle?

The MySpace angle is a selfie shot from above, with the camera up high and tilted down at your face. It puts your eyes front and center and leaves almost everything else out of the frame. It got so common on MySpace profiles that people started making fun of it, and an Urban Dictionary entry for "MySpace angles" showed up in 2006.

Plenty of people knew the trick by heart. Chin down, eyes up, camera high and off to one side. One click, check the screen, try again. Most profile pictures took at least twenty tries, and a few people used the same trick to chase a better score on Hot or Not.

The mirror selfie

If you wanted your outfit in the picture, you used a mirror. You held a digital camera or flip phone up to the bathroom mirror and snapped. The flash usually bounced right off the glass and left a big white blob in the middle of the photo, so people learned to turn the flash off or stand at an angle.

Bathroom mirrors were the favorite spot because the light was bright. That's also why so many old profile pictures have a towel rack or a shower curtain in the background. Nobody noticed at the time, and everybody notices now.

Why didn't people just use the front camera?

Phones didn't have front cameras for selfies until about 2010. The iPhone 4, announced in June 2010, was one of the first popular phones with a front-facing camera, and it was made for video calls. Before that you either flipped the camera around and guessed, or used a mirror. Many people turned the camera around and guessed, checked the screen, and tried again until it looked right.

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Scene hair and side bangs

A lot of MySpace-era photos had the same hairstyle. Emo and scene kids wore flat, straightened hair with long bangs swept over one eye, often dyed black or with bright streaks. The high angle and the side bangs went together perfectly: one eye covered, the other staring right at the camera.

Plenty of people who had that hair cringe at it now, and plenty of others still think it looked great. Either way it took a straightener and a lot of hairspray, plus a good twenty minutes every morning, which is more effort than most of us put into our hair today.

The cameras people used

Most photos from the MySpace years came from small point-and-shoot digital cameras or early phone cameras. Point-and-shoots took better pictures, but you had to plug them into the computer with a cable or pull out a memory card to get the photos off. Phone cameras were blurrier, but they were always in your pocket, and both beat waiting a week for disposable camera prints. Some phones had a tiny mirror next to the lens on the back, made exactly for lining up a selfie.

Uploading was its own chore. You'd come home from a party, plug in the camera and sort through a hundred photos. You picked the best ones and uploaded them one at a time. Then you'd tag your friends and wait for them to complain about how they looked. Those digital camera photos are the ones nobody ever deleted.

Photo shoots with friends

Taking profile pictures was often a group activity. Friends spent whole afternoons taking turns in front of a wall with good light and swapping cameras between poses. The friend with the steadiest hand got booked solid, and the photos from those shoots showed up as everybody's new default the next day.

Editing your profile picture

Once you had the photo, you edited it. Some people added a black-and-white filter, a color pop, glowing edges or text across the bottom. Picnik, a photo editing website that started in 2005, let people pull pictures straight from MySpace, edit them, then put them back. It closed in 2013 after Google bought it.

Then you uploaded the picture through a site like Photobucket or straight to your profile, and waited for the comments.

Where did the word selfie come from?

The word "selfie" was first spotted in an Australian online forum post in 2002. It spread slowly over the next decade and then all at once. In 2013, Oxford Dictionaries named it the Word of the Year, saying its use had grown about 17,000 percent in just one year.

Back in the MySpace days, nobody called them selfies. They were just pictures, usually "pics," and the high-angle ones were called MySpace pics, sometimes as an insult.

What the photo shoot left behind

Your best angle

Profile pictures are still a big deal, and the MySpace angle never fully went away. On FriendCrib, you pick your own default picture and add more in your photo albums. It fits right in with everything else people had on their profiles in 2006.

Make a crib and upload your best angle, whether it's from 2006 or today. Bonus points if the shower curtain is still in the background.

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