How’s this for a #TBT? The first self-portrait in recorded history was made around 1365 B.C by Bek, the chief royal sculptor to Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten. The carved stele shows Bek with his wife Taheret. Cute couple.

Once mirrors became widely available in Europe during the early Renaissance, painters embraced selfies in their work. Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434) contains one early example — the artist can be seen in the mirror behind his subjects. 

 

Women artists have dominated the self-portraiture genre since back in the day. Caterina van Hemessen's 1548 self-portrait is an early example, though we’re partial to Russian painter Zinaida Serebriakova’s At the Dressing-Table (1909) for obvious reasons.

Speaking of women painters, we suspect that if Frida Kahlo had had Instagram, her account would be nothing but selfies. 

In 1839, photography pioneer Robert Cornelius took the first-ever photographic selfie using a box fitted with a lens from an opera glass. Since early daguerrotypes required an exposure time of several minutes, Cornelius had time to remove the lens cap, run into the shot, and, after a few minutes, run back to recover the lens. 

When Kodak released its inexpensive, easy-to-use Brownie box camera in 1900, regular folks like this woman — not just professional photographers — could experiment with snapping pics of themselves.

Selfies: what all the kids are doing these days — since 1914. That year, the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, youngest daughter of Russia’s last Tsar, Nicholas II, took what is believed to be the first-ever selfie by a teenager. The then 13-year-old pointed her Kodak Brownie at her reflection in a mirror and sent the photo she took to her father. "I took this picture of myself looking at the mirror. It was very hard as my hands were trembling,” she wrote in the accompanying letter.

 

 

Starting in the late ‘70s, art photographer Cindy Sherman began using herself as her primary subject, usually disguised in elaborate, sexualized and garish costumes. (In 2011, she collaborated with MAC on a makeup collection.)

Before Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook, MySpace was the selfie capital of the internet. The classic MySpace picture featured an outstretched arm holding the camera from above, a “sexy” facial expression and usually an emo haircut.

In 2010, the iPhone 4 launched with a front-facing camera, making selfies a whole lot easier to manage. The golden age of the selfie had begun.

These photos have gone where no selfie has gone before. Using its own outstretched robotic arm, the Curiosity Mars rover took the first selfie on another planet in September 2012. Japanese astronaut Aki Hoshide took a space selfie that became a viral sensation in 2013.

Last December, Oxford Dictionaries declared “selfie” its 2013 Word of the Year. The word beat out other contenders including “twerk,” “bitcoin,” and “binge-watch,” thanks to a massive 17,000 percent increase in usage between October 2012 and October 2013. The term may be a recent addition to the dictionary, but its lineage can be traced back to 2002, when it first appeared in an Australian internet forum.

 

These days, selfie subcategories are trending in a big way. There are “belfies” (butt selfies; Kim Kardashian is a fan), “ussies” (group selfies), and even “shelfies” (photos of bookshelves — intellectual!).

The New York Times recently covered the rise of “ugly selfies,” which are, as you can probably guess, self-portraits of people making intentionally unattractive faces.

 

During the 86th Academy Awards this month, host Ellen DeGeneres orchestrated a group selfie in an attempt to take the most retweeted photo ever. Her photo broke the previous record in 40 minutes and eventually was retweeted over three million times. Meanwhile, Lupita Nyong'o's photobombing brother has basically won at life.