The craze just got bigger

New Delhi: Look at me, at a Shah Rukh Khan concert! Look at me, with the Pope! Look at me, at a funeral! Look at me, with Queen Elizabeth. The year 2013 was known as the ‘Year of Selfie’, but this global ‘#me’ craze went even bigger in 2014.

On Instagram, there are currently over 53 million photos tagged simply with the hashtag ‘#selfi’. With the rise of smartphones and social media, everybody has the inclination to make photographic self-portraits and post it on the wall and we call it ‘selfie’.

 

History

If you think the first selfie was taken by some teen in his/her bedroom, cheesing with a Polaroid camera, you’re way off-base. The first selfie weren’t even captured on film.

“It really begins in the 1600s when Rembrandt famously paints a self-portrait,” Ben Agger, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Theory at the University of Texas at Arlington, told MTV News.

Many artists have since put a brush to canvas and sketched their own faces, but Rembrandt van Rijn was as big a fan of immortalizing his own face. He painted more than 90 pictures of himself during his lifetime, creating a kind of autobiography in the paint.

It took a few more years for the selfie to progress past canvas, to a medium that allowed those of us whose artistic ability doesn’t extend past drawing smiley faces to etch our own mugs in light. Many sources have claimed — erroneously — that the term selfie itself was first coined all the way around the world in Australia.

Selfie has revolutionized the way people clicks pictures now-a-days. The term “selfie” was discussed by photographer Jim Krause in 2005.

Initially popular with young people, selfies gained wider popularity over time. By the end of 2012, Time magazine considered selfie one of the ‘top 10 buzzwords’ of that year; although selfies had existed long before, it was in 2012 that the term “really hit the big time”.

A poll commissioned by smartphone and camera maker Samsung found that selfies make up 30% of the photos taken by people aged 18–24.

By 2013, the word “selfie” had become commonplace enough to be monitored for inclusion in the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary. In November 2013, the word “selfie” was announced as being the “word of the year” by the Oxford English Dictionary, which gave the word itself an Australian origin. A recent report in 2014 also says that the word “selfie” is among 5,000 new words that have been recently added to the Scrabble dictionary.

Now, what is Belfie?

A ‘bottom selfie’, a photographic self-portrait featuring the buttocks, usually posted by female celebrities on social media networks. According to ‘The Daily Dot’, the first-ever belfie was taken on July 18, 2012. Jen Selter, a “fitness guru” is apparently the Queen of the Belfie.

Unlike Selfie and Belfie, we too have:

Helfie: a selfie where the focus is more prominently on your hairs.

Felfie: a selfie with farm animals.

Selfeye: a selfie showing off one’s eye makeup

Shelfie: a selfie showing the bookshelf.

Welfie: a workout selfie.

Drelfie: a selfie taken in a state of alcohol induced intoxication.

NewsMobile brings you the top 20 best selfies.