The quality of the camera is now one of the most important criteria when choosing a new phone. A second built-in selfie camera is now the norm, too. And while the former can have a night or panoramic mode, the latter allows us to enlarge the eyes or retouch the face and make it slimmer. The right apps will 'beautify' our self-portraits by applying glasses, flower crowns, hats or rabbit ears, and various kinds of filters and frames. If we forgot to smile, the app can add it. It will even let us swap faces with a friend or transform us into a van Gogh painting. The choices are endless. The tools that allow us to add variety to the ordinary selfie paradoxically transported us back to the 19th-century atelier, similarly equipped with props and producing similarly mannered portraits.