Pregnant selfies: pregnancy in one click
Pregnant selfies, or prelfies, are spreading like wildfire on social networks. The rules for a perfect picture? Just lift your top and make sure your tummy gets plenty of exposure. And next up after the prelfie, we have the #brelfie, or breastfeeding selfie.
The prelfie is a a selfie, but with a stomach rather than a person as the star of the show, and the only limitation being the creativity of the mother to be. It's a new phenomenon combining biology, psychology, and social networks.
Lift your top and stick your tummy out
The traditional pregnant selfie involves lifting your top and putting the bulge to the fore. The idea recently made its debut on a maternity website, and was an immediate success, filling the pages of social networks with pictures of bellies: hence the alternative name of bellfie. Apart from their purely hedonistic side, prelfies are about sharing the joys of maternity online.
The rules of prelfies
But what makes a good prelfie? To a large extent it should follow the same unwritten aesthetic code as the selfie, for example favouring natural light over harsh white flash, and choosing an appropriate background to make the image as interesting as possible.
Prelfies: where do fathers fit in?
Fathers-to-be also have a specific role to play in the new world of the prelfie, helping to spread their partners' pictures far and wide, adding comments of their own, and perhaps running sweepstakes on the baby's gender or exactly how far advanced the pregnancy is.
After the prelfie, the brelfie
And now, another innovation is spreading across social networks: it's called the #brelfie, a woman's pictures of herself breastfeeding. It's gaining ground fast thanks to the hashtag, used by celebrity mothers such as actors Olivia Wilde and Alyssa Milano and models Miranda Kerr and Gisele Bündchen.
