What’s your Facebook face?

Marchaè Grair

I am on Facebook too much.

I am both a diehard Facebook user and observer. (Some would call me a Facebook stalker, but they don’t realize how much valuable information one can obtain from social media.)

After I spend hours on Facebook a week, I feel guilty for dedicating my limited time to something so unnecessary.

I start to lose this guilt, however, when I look at people’s profiles when they are obviously on Facebook 10 times more than I am.

As I was Web surfing the other day, I chose to put off chores and school reading to observe a growing Facebook phenomenon — the Facebook face.

The “Facebook face” is the repeated expression someone uses in the pictures he or she posts on Facebook in an attempt to encourage a certain perception of himself or herself by the person who views his or her profile.

Facebook users, I write the following with your Internet safety in mind. I am trying to protect you from looking like a tool.

Please consider a new Facebook look if you use the following poses on a normal basis:

• The lip pucker: Girls use this face in pictures to look like they are kissing something or someone who may or may not be in the picture. Unfortunately, girls pucker their lips so hard that a cute face turns into a slightly goofy, and slightly terrifying one. Puckering is for lovers only. Leave your creepy puckered face out of your Facebook photos. You look like a deformed duck.

• Eyes on the heavens: This face is for people who are obviously taking planned pictures of themselves, but inexplicably looking at the sky. Message to people using this picture: No one thinks your eye roll is that revolutionary. Everyone knows you are standing in your bathroom trying to get the perfect Facebook profile picture. Surprise! It’s not working.

• Mirror Time: I get it. You have really nice abs. You worked out every day, ate nothing but protein bars, and inked new tattoos the world has to see. This doesn’t mean it’s flattering to get in front of a mirror and take a picture of yourself half-naked for your Facebook. I can see your dirty toilet behind your half-dressed body, and both your nudity and soiled toilet disgust me.

It’s even worse when mirror offenders take a picture of their bodies without their faces in it. This leaves the Facebook browser to assume the picture isn’t really that person or that person is pretending to be shy by hiding his or her face, when everyone knows he or she is a vain idiot for posting 20 pictures of his or her body in a Facebook album.

• Toilet Smiles: It will never be cute to take a picture on the toilet and post it on Facebook. But for some reason, plenty of people think it is. I don’t want to think of you having a bowel movement every time I look at your Facebook. Knock it off.

• Worst Day Ever: If it’s the worst day of your life and you want to cry, why is it your first priority to take a Facebook picture of yourself? The world does not pity you. Stop brooding and get off of Facebook.

There are many more Facebook faces I could warn against, but it looks like my Webcam is done loading. Time for a photo shoot.

Marchaè Grair is a senior electronic media management major and columnist for the Daily Kent Stater. Contact her at [email protected].