March 18, 2025

Photo: Elena Kulikova/Getty Images

Nika Motiie says she cannot go a day without “obsessively” photographing herself — to date, the 20-year-old has over 50,000 selfies in her camera roll. “I take them throughout the day, like almost every hour,” she tells me. “I’m trying to analyze how others see me so I know what they think I look like. It’s an exhausting cycle, but it feels like the only way for me to understand or control how I look to others.”

It didn’t always used to be this way. Motiie, an undergrad at the University of Arkansas, says that she used to be confident in her appearance during her middle-school years — until she began building a presence on social media (she currently has 368,000 followers on TikTok). “I started seeing videos of very pretty girls who would go viral, with everyone in the comments talking about how perfect they looked,” she says. “Naturally, I just started comparing myself to all these videos and images online — my face structure just felt so different. That’s what made me question whether I was truly pretty.”

Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photo: Getty Images

By Madame Clairevoyant

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A biweekly newsletter interrogating modern family life, written by Kathryn Jezer-Morton.