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John Nguyen and his wife Vickie Chan of Duarte take pictures of themselves Saturday at Selfie Selfie Photo Studio, a new business in Arcadia.
John Nguyen and his wife Vickie Chan of Duarte take pictures of themselves Saturday at Selfie Selfie Photo Studio, a new business in Arcadia.
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ARCADIA >> A selfie craze that swept China has infiltrated majority-Asian Arcadia, which claims to have America’s first “selfie photo studio,” private rooms where customers can snap quality and even costumed shots of themselves using a remote control.

Selfie Selfie Photo Studio in downtown Arcadia is a “me too” venture of the popular 321 Photo Studio franchise in China, said Jason Chen, spokesman for the San Gabriel Valley business. Malaysia already has one and Vancouver recently opened its own.

“I definitely do have the confidence to say this will be the next big thing in the San Gabriel Valley,” Chen said. “We just need time for the customers to learn and understand how this works.”

The studio at 28 1/2 E. Huntington Drive opened in December and is a private, large-scale version of photo booths seen at wedding banquets. Customers go into a room filled with props and costumes, including video game Mario and Luigi outfits, Mao communist garb and Sumo wrestler duds. Then they enter a windowless room equipped with a full-length mirror, consumer-level DSLR, umbrella lights and a 32-inch computer monitor that instantly outputs photos customers take with a small, wireless remote control.

San Gabriel Valley cities such as Alhambra and Arcadia already have stores devoted to fancy photo booths that can add words or exaggerate lips and eyes. The machines print stickers or a photo sheet, but Chen said his business offers full-body shots that can be put on a USB drive and easily published on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Oxford Dictionaries’ 2013 word of the year was “selfie,” which it said was first used in 2002. The 2014 holiday gift of the year was the “selfie stick,” a monopod that attaches to smartphones. These arm extensions exploded in Asia first, so Chen said his business concept has a successful precedence.

Some 86 percent of Americans in a 2014 Travelzoo poll said they take at least one selfie a week and at least a third of the 2,300 surveyed admitted to taking three or more a week.

Michael Germano, a social media marketing professor at Cal State L.A., said the desire to take self portraits is not new, but selfie became a trend once smartphones made these photos easy to snap and social media facilitated distribution.

“It’s psychic income — a form of validation,” Germano said. “If they’re getting what they want, that could be fine, but if they’re not getting what they want, it could lead to a lot of negative feelings rather than validating ones: frustration, disappointment, maybe even anger.”

Germano said the selfie is a narrative device that documents an ever-changing life and is particularly important to young people ages 18 to 30 because their lives and even appearance alter so rapidly.

Yet selfies could warp people’s perception of self. Some 13 percent of American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery members attributed an increase in rhinoplasty, hair transplants and eyelid surgery to increased photo sharing.

“Social platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and the iPhone app Selfie.im, which are solely image based, force patients to hold a microscope up to their own image and often look at it with a more self-critical eye than ever before,” said Dr. Edward Farrior, president of the AAFPRS, in a statement. “These images are often the first impressions young people put out there to prospective friends, romantic interests and employers, and our patients want to put their best face forward.”

Erica Im, from Pasadena, said she takes selfies and at least three of her friends own a selfie stick. These photos are a way for people to express themselves on social media, she said, but an excessive amount can make people seem self-absorbed.

Im, who grew up in Korea, said she might go to a selfie photo studio so she could be silly with friends. The concept is similar to the sticker photo booths she and her classmates swarmed to as teenagers.

Germano, however, is skeptical about the business venture.

“The attractiveness of selfies right now is their ease of use and their spontaneity,” he said. “When you make it more constructed behavior, I think that makes it lose appeal for a lot of people.”