By Frances Wilson Sadly, it doesn't come as a great surprise to me that the Oxford Dictionaries have named "selfie" as the word of the year. Its usage has apparently increased by 17,000 per cent over the past 12 months, but I've been living in a selfie-obsessed household for far longer than that. For those who don't really know what a selfie is, it's defined as "a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically with a smartphone or webcam, and uploaded to a social media website." Revealing: Ex-Coronation Street star Helen Flanagan shows off her assets in a selfie posted on Instagram This is why my 15-year-old daughter spends most of the day staring into her phone, puckering up her lips to make a "kissy" face, then pressing the button to take a picture. As a result of doing this numerous times and then poring over the pictures, there is nothing she doesn't know about the shape of her eyebrows, the line of her nose or the length of her eyelashes. Posing: Kelly Brook posted this selfie on Twitter But the real reason she takes all those pictures is that, like most of her contemporaries, she lacks confidence in her appearance - and she lacks confidence in her appearance because she lives in a world of selfies. When she thinks she's looking all right, she'll take a picture, upload it to a social media site such as Facebook or the photo-sharing website Instagram, and wait for the phone to start pinging with "likes," which means that other people have taken a look and decided they like what they see. That's all very well and, you might even think, harmless. But heaven help us if she gets anything other than "likes" - for these days the self-esteem of young women, and men, is more fragile than it has ever been. And here lies the problem. For selfies reduce people from complex, clever, funny characters to two-dimensional images to be judged entirely on the way they look. Depressingly, the sexier you are deemed to look, the more "likes" you get. There are even websites that tell you how to take a good selfie: holding the camera above your head makes your eyes look unnaturally big and your chin look slim. Mouths should be wide open as though you were having a tremendous but not unpleasant shock, or faces should be scrunched up as if you were in the throes of passion. So, how did this unnerving trend - for parents, at least - come about? Like so much else that's wrong with society, it caught on as a fad among celebrities. They take selfies in their bedrooms, their bathrooms or at parties. Famous face: Our first ever Papal selfie depicts The Holy Father with a group of teenagers at the Vatican The whole point, of course, is that such people live entirely in the eye of the camera. They are selling themselves as products to their followers on Twitter and "friends" on Facebook. Indeed, the appearance online of a new celebrity selfie is treated like breaking news of the greatest import. Reality TV star Kim Kardashian's recent photograph - in which she pictured herself from the rear wearing a white swimsuit - has gained more than a million "likes" on the internet. Her mother said she was "proud" of her daughter, who recently became a mother herself, for sharing her bottom. Popular: Kim Kardashian's recent selfie has gained more than a million 'likes' on the internet The proud granny claimed that Kim, having lost her pregnancy weight, looked once more like "my baby." But Kim didn't look like anyone's "baby" - she looked like a brainless, narcissistic hussy. The trouble is that millions of ordinary men and women want to ape the stars whose images appear in magazines and online around the world. It is their chance to feel just a little bit like celebrities, too. But for girls like my daughter, trusting your self-worth to the click of a camera is a perilous path. Thousands of young girls feel pressure from boys raised on a diet of pornography to send pictures of themselves with few or no clothes on. Surely if you are used to posting selfies all day, it is going to be less of a big step to send an image that you could come to bitterly regret? There is a new internet application called Snapchat, which allows you to send a self-image to your friends that will be deleted automatically after ten seconds - in theory, avoiding the humiliation that could follow if it was disseminated around the internet. But even this isn't reliable: earlier this month a group of boys aged 13 to 15 were arrested in Canada on pornography charges, when they were discovered by a teacher digitally capturing and saving explicit Snapchat photos of young girls. The girls who had posed for, or taken, the images believed they would disappear into cyberspace after a few seconds. It's not just teenagers, however, or Hollywood inhabitants who take selfies. We have had our first Papal selfie, in an image that captures the Holy Father in a group shot at the Vatican. The camera was not held above his head - I suppose he didn't check the advice online - and so Pope Francis looks as though he has too many chins. There goes the mystique of the Roman Catholic Church. The Archbishop of Canterbury has also succumbed, and David Cameron has been caught napping on a bed in the background of a selfie taken before her at a wedding by his sister-in-law. I've tried to be positive about selfies. As the word is in the process of becoming an official part of our language, the obsession has clearly embedded itself in our "culture." Slumber: David Cameron's sister-in-law posted this selfie, featuring the Prime Minister taking a power nap Surely there must be more to it than pandering to the vanity of the famous, feeding the insecurities of our children and exposing them to the possibility of online abuse? Some psychologists, looking on the bright side, rehearse the theory that selfies are the modern equivalent of the self-portrait. Rembrandt's 100 self-portraits were therefore, in fact, selfies. What utter tosh, and how banal and irresponsible to suggest a comparison. Did Rembrandt pose with his tongue hanging out, and rush round asking friends whether they "liked" the way he looked? Selfies reduce people from complex, clever characters to two-dimensional images Frances Wilson Like all great artists, he did his best to capture the truth when he looked at his face in the glass. Selfies, which require you to have no genius beyond the ability to hold a phone at arm's length, are about masks. Another defender suggested they provide a means for the young to "see themselves as others see them." The point of a selfie, however, is that you take it yourself. They are not about people seeing themselves as others do, but about telling others how you'd like to be seen. Selfies, therefore, encourage narcissism to blossom in the most modest of people. And if the rest of the world does not like what it sees in you, the results can be very painful.