These days, you can hardly step outside your house without seeing somebody snapping a selfie. If you’re going to do the selfie thing, consider a specialized app. Selfie apps are loaded with tools that are specifically designed to enhance your natural good looks and emphasize your best features. Below, we’ve listed our favorite selfie apps to help you snap an inspiring Instagram portrait. Once you’ve snapped a few selfies, you may want to apply some additional editing to your photos. For that, have a look at our collection of the best photo editing apps available.
As you peruse our list, note that few downloadable apps are completely free for unlimited use. These days, nearly all apps listed as free for download feature either subscription options or in-app purchases to unlock all advertised features. Developers will typically charge fees after a specified free trial period, or you can elect to pay by the month or year. Some apps do offer limited special features for free or with ads. Before you invest time in using a free photo app, make sure you understand its terms of use and payment structure.
BeautyPlus
BeautyPlus offers a wide variety of editing tools to help make your selfie shine. You can choose from a myriad of stickers, filters, and even ready-made templates for times when you want a good-looking selfie quickly. The makeup option is quite versatile, letting you experiment with lipstick shades, eyebrow styles, and eyelashes. You can even remove pimples and scars to sport spotless, clear skin in all your photos. Plus, it offers face-slimming and teeth-whitening tools to make your photo dazzle. The newest versions of the app add a background lock to prevent backdrop distortion, new background categories, upgraded text functionality, upgraded brushes, and an AI-based photo-repair feature for old, faded pictures.
Facetune Editor
Facetune Editor is the ultimate selfie app. It ensures that regardless of what you consider to be your facial flaws, you can use the app to correct them — and your parents will still recognize you. Specific retouching tools let you fix problem skin, whiten teeth, slim down or fatten up your face, brighten eyes, tame eyebrows, or go glamorous with full makeup and glitter. The app offers advanced tools for altering the light source, removing shadows and glare, and controlling color temperature and saturation. Brighten your visage with a makeup palette of rainbow colors, multicolor neon filters, and light-leak effects. A “magic camera” lets you tweak features and add makeup as you shoot with live filters to enhance your look. Choose from dozens of backdrop themes, including collage, urban, and fashion. A hair tool lets you experiment with hair color. Full video support for makeup, retouching, overlays, layouts, and more is now available.
Retrica
Retrica is a social network as well as a selfie photo and video app that gets you into the Instagram groove with tons of filters and stylized looks. You can preview dozens of gorgeous filters before you take your shot — but it doesn’t stop there. Retrica supports selfie collages with shots from various different angles, live videos, or GIFs. Annotate your images with doodles, time stamps, messages, and stickers. The app encourages you to connect with and follow fellow selfie fanatics via the app’s chronological feed. You can also share your photos on Facebook and other social networks or send images via private message.
AirBrush
AirBrush offers an easy, flexible take on the selfie genre, and if you’re obsessed with creating the perfect portrait, this app gives you plenty of options. You can extinguish most obvious skin tone issues, blemishes, and other facial flaws with a tap, but the real fun lies in tweaking individual features to enlarge your eyes, slim your face, narrow your nose, or go completely Hollywood with a slate of makeup looks to suit every occasion. If you hate applying makeup directly to your mug, you can still get the full treatment with AirBrush. Additional features include premium presets like Smooth 2.0 to fix skin imperfections. The Hair Dye update lets you add shine to your locks. A Relight tool features 3D lighting presets to enhance photo brightness, hue, and softness. A Foundation tool helps to conceal wrinkles, and blemishes, while the Teeth feature whitens and aligns your smile.
Cymera
If you’re looking for a selfie cam with an indie attitude, have a peek at Cymera. Cymera not only lets you edit your face but also lets you style your presentation. First, perfect your look with 150 filters and special effects that emphasize skin smoothing, hair, and makeup. Body shapers can trim your waist or reshape your legs. But what’s really intriguing about this app is its collection of camera lenses — divided lenses, fisheye, Lomo, and others. A silent mode lets you shoot on the sly. When you’re done, you can style your composition with a variety of stickers, art effects, built-in collage grids, or blurred backgrounds.
SelfieCity
Do cities have identifiable looks and fashionable styles? Does your personality reflect a particular city? SelfieCity uses this trope as a metaphor for self-reflection in addition to several other features that distinguish it from ordinary selfie apps. Each city — Formosa, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, New York — offers a set of filters that are designed to broadly reflect its character or neighborhoods. There’s also Double Exposure, Selfie Collage (combining up to 16 portraits), blurring and vignetting, live augmented reality (AR) effects, and a feature that mimics Apple live photos. The app’s intelligent beautification feature uses face recognition to enhance skin tone and texture. It may or may not be your cuppa, but the concepts are intriguing, with results that are highly conceptual and artistic. Updated features include one-click filters, 15-second videos, and cinematic styles.
A Color Story
It’s not just another pretty interface chock full of filters. A Color Story rocks some serious editing tools for both photos and videos that help you improve your portraits even before you start to tackle faces. With over 500 filters designed by photo pros, 120 effects, and a boatload of advanced photo tools, your selfie is in good, colorful hands. A Color Story takes a different approach to filters in that it enhances colors already present in your composition to create an engaging scene. The app uses light leaks, flares, color fogs, and blend modes to give your selfie that artistic flair. Look out for Instagram grid preview and planning features, and even batch editing. Enjoy advanced adjustments to your favorite filters, allowing you to adjust each filter’s warmth, saturation, and brightness. Updated versions include object removal, zoom for precision, a linear selection tool, and photo blemish remover.
YouCam Perfect
YouCam Perfect lets you shoot both still and video selfies, while an auto-beautify feature enhances your looks. The app masks skin flaws, while an eye enhancer enlarges eyes and removes under-eye puffiness. With group selfies, the app’s multi-face detection enhances each face in your shot. YouCam Perfect improves selfies with elements like stickers, backgrounds, collages, and frames and can remove distracting background objects. With full-body portraits, the app works to lengthen legs and slim bodies or make you look taller or shorter. You get a mirror tool, animated effects like rainbow lights, auto-detect that provides sharper cut-outs for your portraits, and a range of presets, animated stickers, and effects for premium members. A sky and one-tap background replacement let you transport your tableau. There are also neat classic collage styles, a blending (double exposure) tool, teeth whitening, and TikTok sharing. Updated versions offer special autumn backgrounds and other fall goodness.
Perfect365
For when you absolutely must look drop-dead gorgeous for your portrait, you can rely on Perfect365. This virtual makeup app sports numerous makeup and beauty tools, plus over 200 presets and looks. A pro color palette lets you experiment with different color combinations. Perfect365 offers built-in beauty advice, complete with video tutorials, makeup tips, subtle feature enhancement, or full-on glam. The app’s face detection promotes a natural look with accurate makeup. What separates Perfect365 from similar apps isn’t just the tools but also its slider-based effects. It’s lined with a melange of celebrity-inspired templates aimed at beautifying your selfie, whether you’re set on trying a new pair of lashes or adjusting your skin tone.
Snapchat
While Snapchat lets you take any kind of photo or video you want, most people use it for selfies. After snapping a photo, you can add text overlays, World Lenses, and Bitmoji, send it to friends and family, and have your creation self-destruct at a set interval. That ensures no one else besides the intended recipients get to see your crazy cat whiskers and dog ears. You can also shoot a selfie with Snapchat and save it to your camera roll to post to Instagram or Facebook. Choose Save to memories and Camera roll to save your photos. You can also save snaps by pressing and holding on the Snap in chat for photo snaps set to No Limit and video snaps set to Loop.
Camera360
With Camera360, you can experiment with AR, animal face stickers, animated frames, themes, costumes, and sound effects for photos and videos that make your photo reflect more of your inner self than you ever dared share. But seriously, the app also includes traditional imaging tools like crop, sharpness, and color temperature, as well as beautification tools that apply makeup, hide blemishes, enlarge eyes, plump lips, slim noses and cheeks, and whiten teeth. Choose from a variety of special effects like light leaks and color casts, or paint artistic effects directly on your mug. The app features over 100 photo filters and live filters, plus a one-tap remover pen to eliminate blemishes for perfect skin. You can now get more facial features for free alongside a new custom backdrop-change feature. A blending mode lets you create a double exposure to layer color and opacity or add a stroke effect. A brand new AI-based eraser gives you one-tap erasure.
Selfie Editor
This app, for iOS only, has all you could ask for when it comes to refining the ultimate selfie. The interface is quite colorful and intuitive. After you capture your photo, you can quickly and effortlessly start editing it in the app. Auto mode gives you sliders to adjust skin tone, brightness, smoothness, lip width and height, eye sharpness, and teeth whitening. You can edit the size of your eyes, nose, and jaw and then apply your favorite filters from a seemingly infinite list of choices.
Pip Camera Pro
Pip Camera Pro livens up your selfies with a roundup of creative 3D borders that showcase the character of your face and disposition. Your picture gets filtered through everyday objects like bubbles, camera lenses, bottles, glasses, hearts, and other components that most people would not typically associate with selfies. Combining these diverse props and adding them to your selfies is fun and makes for some unique and sometimes bizarre-looking photos. The app comes with additional filters you can use to customize your photo’s foreground and background. You don’t even have to limit your photos to the best pictures because the app has a photomontage feature that lets you show off every selfie you take.
