Junaid Ahmed, a 22-year-old man from Peterborough, UK, is obsessed with selfies. He can spend up to three hours getting himself ready for his daily photo-shoots, and claims to snap around 200 photos of himself, uploading the best of them to his Instagram page.

An ex-fashion student and model, Junaid treats every day like a photo-shoot and even calls himself the ‘selfie king’. To make sure he looks his best for his 50,000 Instagram followers, the young man gets weekly facials, has his eyebrows done and spends hours in front of the mirror applying makeup. Over the years, he has also undergone several cosmetic procedures, including veneered teeth, chin fillers, cheek fillers, jawline fillers, lip fillers, botox under the eyes and on the head, tattooed eyebrows and fat freezing. That’s a lot for anyone, let alone a 22-year-old, but Junaid claims it’s all worth it as long as he gets the attention he seeks on social media.

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Selfies have become such a huge part of our lives that it’s hard to believe that they only became popular only a few years ago. People are snapping pics of themselves virtually everywhere, from the top of skyscrapers to their bathrooms, and we even gadgets and accessories designed around selfies. Things have gotten so bad that one artist has decided to take a stand against the selfie craze in a very unique way. Meet Stephanie Leigh Rose, the creator of “stefdies”.

What are “selfdies”, you ask? Well, Stephanie describes them as “anti-selfies”, but more specifically it is just the artist playing dead in random places, many of them popular tourist attractions. She just drops to the ground, face down, and pretends that she’s dead for a few moments, while someone takes her photo. She chronicles her unusual series on Instagram, where you can see her playing dead in a variety of places, from the Eiffel Tour and Louvre Museum, in Paris, to the Golden State Bridge, in San Francisco.

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An Israeli entrepreneur who has spent a year designing a product that would make him rich, saw his dreams collapse after putting his product on Kickstarer to raise some extra production funding. Just seven days after the start of the crowdfunding campaign, copycats were already available on Chinese online stores like Alibaba.

With the popularity of selfies growing to epic proportions in the last few years, Yekutiel Sherman felt the infectious trend provided a lucrative business opportunity, so a couple of years ago he started working on an alternative to the common selfie stick. By December 2015, he had created prototypes of his innovative Stickbox – a smartphone case that doubled as a selfie stick – secured some funds from his family and even shot a promotional video of two lovers using the Stickbox to get a selfie with the Eiffel Tower. Everything was going according to plan, but that was until he launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for $40,000.

Just one week after starting the Kickstarter campaign, exact replicas of the Stickbox had appeared on Chinese e-commerce giants like Alibaba, at a fraction of the price set by Sherman. It turns out that even before he had had a chance to look for a factory to mass-produce his product, Chinese manufacturers had stolen his idea from Kickstarter and replicated it in record time. He had become a victim of China’s lightning-fast copycats, and there wasn’t much he could do about it at this point.

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Casio’s latest offering, the Exilim EX-TR70, is priced at a whopping $1,399! That’s rather steep for a compact camera, but the price tag is justified by its unbelievable selfie-friendly features. Targeted mainly at Chinese women who are obsessed with taking photos of themselves and sharing them online, the camera is expected to earn the Japanese company a $403 million profit this year.

The new TR70 is a third generation Exilim, a line of unusually shaped cameras that are specifically made for selfies. Right from the physical features to the UI, these cameras are streamlined to help the user click the perfect pic of their face every time. The hinged frame helps the device support itself, so it can easily be placed on any surface to face the subject. It offers several ways to actually click a picture, including squeezing the body, using the ‘selfie pad’ on the side, using a countdown self-timer, placing the hand on a certain part of the frame to be detected by the camera, and by touching the 3” LCD.

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Long before selfies became a way of life, this Alaska man began to take pictures of himself every day. Now, 16 years later, Jonathan Keller has released an extraordinary time-lapse video consisting of a whopping 5,840 pictures of his face! The three-and-a-half minute video shows his transformation from a 22-year-old young adult to his current 39-year-old self.

Keller’s project, titled ‘Living My Life Faster’, began on October 1, 1998. Ever since, he’s been taking one picture of himself every single day, wearing the same emotionless expression. His goal, it seems, is to show that the daily changes to his appearance are almost insignificant when viewed in chronological order. But the ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures show that he has indeed aged visibly.

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Taxi driver Teng Jiazhi, from Shenyang city in north China, is probably the world’s greatest selfie enthusiast. He was taking photos of himself with his passengers long before selfies became a social phenomenon, simply as a way to brighten up their day. Fondly known as “Uncle Teng”, the friendly cab driver has amassed a collection of over 30,000 selfies in the last 5 years.

Teng revealed that he came up with the unique idea ten years ago, when he picked up a couple of tourists on a winter day. “They had been standing in the cold for more than an hour for a taxi,” he recalled. “When they got in my car, they kept thanking me and offered tips. But I could not take the extra money. Before they dropped off, they wanted to take a photo with me. The gratitude they had was very comforting and that photo was the first selfie I took with my passenger.”

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Like millions of Americans, Triana Lavey loves taking selfies. But the 37-year-old television producer from Los Angeles didn’t really like herself in her Facebook photos or during Skype chats. So in 2012, she decided to get plastic surgery to achieve the perfect selfie look. Triana spent a whopping $15,000 to change the shape of her face. And that’s just the discounted price because her plastic surgeon is a family friend.

Triana believes in presenting the best of herself online. “Your social media presence is just as important as your real life presence,” she said. But she was not always happy with the selfie pictures she took. She would use popular iPhone apps with filters that gave her the perfect airbrushed look. But over time, she began to notice flaws in her face that she felt needed more permanent fixing. Changing camera angles didn’t work anymore, so she decided to go under the knife for a nose job and a chin implant.

“Ten years ago, I don’t think I even noticed that I have a weak chin,” Triana had said before her surgery. “That darned chin bugs the living daylights out of me. It’s kind of the first thing I look for in the photos – ‘how does my chin look?’ – which is really weird.” So she had an implant inserted into her chin at  Dr. Richard Ellenbogen’s clinic in Beverly Hills. The doctor didn’t stop with the chin, though. He suggested a few other changes like fat grafting and a nose job. Triana was convinced she needed them too and ended up spending $15,000 on her face.

Changing your face just to look good in pictures might sound extreme, but Triana doesn’t think so. She’s really happy with the way her face turned out. “I now have the face that I always thought I had,” she said. “I look like myself, but Photoshopped.” And she believes that plastic surgery isn’t just about getting an ego-boost. She thinks it’s actually a necessity in today’s world.

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19-year-old Danny Bowman is England’s and perhaps the world’s first self-confessed selfie addict. It might seem funny, but this addiction is every bit as serious and dangerous as any other. In fact, the young boy almost lost his life over his obsession of taking the perfect selfie photograph.

Danny used to spend about 10 hours taking over 200 selfies on his iPhone, every single day. At one point, his addiction got so bad that he stopped going to school and didn’t leave his house for six months. He even lost almost 30 pounds trying to make himself more photogenic. When his parents tried to stop him, he turned aggressive. And in a final, drastic attempt to cure himself of his disease, Danny overdosed on drugs.

“I was constantly in search of taking the perfect selfie and when I realized I couldn’t, I wanted to die,” he said. “I lost my friends, my education, my health, and almost my life.” Fortunately, Danny was saved by his mother Penny, before the his selfie addiction claimed his life. He is now being treated for technology addiction, OCD and Body Dysmorphic Disorder, which is an excessive anxiety about personal appearance.

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There’s no shame in being single, but if you’d like your friends and acquaintances to think you’re in a loving relationship, you can follow the example of Keisuke Jinushi, a young Japanese photographer who has mastered the art of making his right hand the perfect photo girlfriend.

Being single can be pretty uncomfortable, especially when all your friends are in relationships and can’t seem to shut up about their perfect girlfriends and the good times they have together. Of course, that’s not the case of Keisuke Jinushi, the guy in the photos below. He obviously has a very caring girlfriend who loves to feed him delicious treats, wipe the corners of his mouth of ketchup or grab his mouth in a very affectionate manner. She’s the one who took the photos, so she must be real, right?  No, not really. It was Keisuke himself who took the photos, and that’s actually his own right hand feeding his mouth. But why would anyone do something like that? Apparently, the talented photographer just wanted to share his “selfie” tricks to show everyone just how easy it is to share a romantic moment even if they’re sharing it with themselves.

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