Illustration: Lu Ting/GT

Gao Xiaosong, an ordinary-looking Chinese celebrity, posted a beautified selfie on his Weibo account recently. In the modified selfie, his skin was smooth, his color was whiter and his round face a lot slimmer. The post attracted over 6,500 comments and around 21,000 thumb-ups on Weibo.

Many online users made fun of this selfie. One online user commented: "Gao, I don't recognize this - is this you? Have you had plastic surgery recently?" Another Weibo user even restored the altered selfie to its original version, and sent it to Gao along with the message: "I hope this makes you realize what you really look like."

Like Gao, many people nowadays are fond of taking selfies and posting them on social websites. Like it or not, selfies have become a fact of life. In China, particularly, a large number of young girls are obsessed with taking selfies, and have the recipes for how to make a selfie a good selfie.

The first thing is the angle. Most Chinese girls like holding their smartphones above them at a 45-degree angle which makes their faces appear slimmer and their eyes larger in the photograph. Many of us choose the "duck face" as our facial expression, keeping the eyes wide open, looking cute and innocent. Some like to pout or slightly bite their lower lips for a sexy look.

For a taller slimmer body in a photo, Chinese girls ask friends or boyfriends to squat on the ground and shoot upwards, so their legs look longer and slimmer.

But that's just the start. Chinese girls are also geniuses with the many mobile applications that enhance their portraits. Few Chinese girls will post a selfie or picture without polishing it, and most have at least one or two selfie-editing apps on their smartphones. These apps are better (and safer) than plastic surgery and can change skin tones, body shapes and height at the flick of a finger.

My friend Susan cannot live without Meitu Xiu Xiu, one of the most popular photo-editing apps that boasts more than 440 million users. For every selfie she takes she then spends around three minutes whitening her skin, making acne disappear, brightening and making her eyes bigger, thinning her face and arms and stretching her legs.

Westerners might feel confused why Chinese girls waste so much time on taking, editing and posting selfies with the same angle, facial expressions and pose over and over. I think it just offers girls, unlike their mirrors, an effortless way to view a better-looking version of themselves.

Becoming better-looking usually requires a lot of time, money and effort. If you want to lose 4 kilograms, you have to exercise and keep to a strict diet. If you want to have flawless skin, you need to maintain a healthy lifestyle and invest a lot of money on skincare products. If you want to have a more attractive face, plastic surgery can help - but it's expensive and painful. Selfie apps, however, can fix all our flaws within seconds and for free.

And when you post one of these touched-up selfies on a social networking platform, you can bask in the warm feeling as friends and strangers compliment you. The only problem is that they may be very disappointed when they meet the real you.

Roy, one of my male friends, "fled" from a blind date because the girl looked nothing like the good looker she appeared to be in her selfie. His parents had shown him the girl's picture and he thought she looked attractive. And when he checked her pictures on WeChat she looked even more delightful. They exchanged chats for a couple of weeks before Roy got the courage to ask her out for a dinner at a nice restaurant.

But when he saw her in person, he was so very disappointed. She had bad skin and she was overweight. Not at all like her pictures. "It was just like getting something you bought online and finding it's not at all like the pictures," Roy said. They had dinner, he paid but he never saw her again. He felt he had been cheated.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Global Times.