How to Take a .5 Selfie in 4 Easy Steps

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Jump on the Gen Z photo trend

Co-authored by Crystal Bear and Carmine Shannon

Last Updated: August 7, 2023 Fact Checked

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• What is a .5 selfie?
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• How to Take a .5 Selfie
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• The Culture of the .5 Selfie
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• Expert Interview

|Show more |Show less

The .5 (pronounced point 5) selfie’s rise to stardom is marked by spaghetti-like arms, huge foreheads, and long necks—and that’s the appeal. Unlike a traditional selfie, the .5 version isn’t about giving the camera your best smize, it’s about capturing a moment and distorting your body beyond recognition. Sound like fun? If you want to learn more about this Gen Z trend and start taking more memorable photos, keep on reading! It’s time to get silly.

Things You Should Know

• The .5 selfie is taken with the ultrawide lens on the back camera of a phone.
• The ultrawide angle distorts selfies and gives bodies weird proportions.
• Take a .5 by holding your phone at arm’s length and taking a picture with the volume button.

Steps

Section 1 of 3:

What is a .5 selfie?

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1. 1
   The .5 selfie is a Gen Z photo trend, popularized in 2022. Ultrawide angle lenses on smartphones have been around since the iPhone 11 Pro Max, released in 2019, but the .5 trend only got popular in 2022. Gen Z celebrities have been filling their Instagrams with the silly selfies ever since.
2. 2
   They’re semi-distorted and usually taken with the back camera of a phone. The weird proportions that come from an ultrawide lens are a big part of the .5’s charm. When you take a picture in .5 things that are closer to the lens are bigger, and things further away are smaller. This leads to pics with big foreheads and noses, tiny bodies and long arms.
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Section 2 of 3:

How to Take a .5 Selfie

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1. 1
   Open your phone’s back camera. Using a .5 camera harkens back to the true olden days of selfies, taken with digital cameras without a front monitor where you could check your image. It's almost like film, each photograph is a surprise—you just have to wait until you turn the camera back around.

   • The back camera of your phone is also much better quality than the front. If you’re looking to take a regular good selfie, use the back camera.
2. 2
   Change your camera’s lens to “.5”. To take the .5 selfie, you need a .5 camera. Open your camera app and either press “.5” or pinch the screen to open the zoom options and change to .5.

   • Sadly, not every phone has this capability. iPhone 11 and onwards has the lens, as well as some flagship Samsungs and Google Pixels.
3. 3
   Turn on the flash. This isn’t entirely necessary, but to make your picture more intense and fully get the Gen Z vibe, brighten things up with the flash.
4. 4
   Hold the camera at arm’s length. The .5 lens captures a really wide range (thus the wide angle lens), so get it as far away from you as you can to get the most background and full effect. If you’re looking for a more distorted photo, tilt the camera to be parallel to the ground.
5. 5
   Take the picture with the volume button or use a timer. Trying to press the capture button on screen is a little hard when your arm is stretched to its limit and your phone is turned around. Luckily, you can snap a pic by pressing the volume button or setting a countdown timer. Strike a pose and you’ll be ready to go!
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Section 3 of 3:

The Culture of the .5 Selfie

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1. 1
   Originally the .5 selfie was a response to the manicured style of the 2010s. Remember when every picture on Instagram was highly filtered and facetuned? For a while it was all the rage to be as perfect and pretty as possible, but that’s not the point of the .5. This selfie trend started as an “anti aesthetic aesthetic” that lets things be more “casual”.
2. 2
   The .5 selfie is purposefully self deprecating. Nothing says “I’m okay with who I am” like a silly, distorted picture. Instead of showing off your prettiest self, you’re showing off your goofy, lighthearted side.

   • There are some aspects of the .5 that mirror good selfie taking practices. Taking the picture from above and tilting your head down slightly actually looks pretty nice in a normal pic.
3. 3
   As of late, the .5 selfie has become more about looking good. Although some selfies are true to their roots of anti-aesthetic and casual photos, people have started using the lens to take posed selfies meant to make them look their best. Being able to play with the proportions of your body can be flattering as well as funny.
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