In 1925, a new, highly desirable trait was invented. Press reports hailed a new Hollywood star: Count Ludwig von Salm-Hoogstraeten, an Austrian noble and tennis champion, who was rumored to be appearing in a film from the megaproducer Samuel Goldwyn. What made the 39-year-old Hollywood material? “He is photogenic,” Goldwyn told a reporter. Newspapers quickly credited the producer with coining a new word.

As it turned out, von Salm-Hoogstraeten’s acting career did not take off, but Goldwyn’s turn of phrase sure did. Now, nearly a century later, photogenicity is essential to the vocabulary of the selfie era. A photogenic person, common thinking goes, looks effortlessly good in a photograph. On social media, photogenicity has become a kind of currency: the intangible “it” factor that can lead to a high follower count. As a result, articles now promise to unspool the secrets of photogenicity; people on TikTok have been taking random stills from their videos to apparently determine whether they’re photogenic. For the rest of us, the concept might serve to justify an aversion to selfies (we’re not unattractive; we’re just not photogenic).

Yet delve into the research, and there’s little direct evidence for the idea that some people are naturally better looking on camera. Perhaps, instead, when someone gets called “photogenic,” what people are really referring to is a practiced sense of ease in front of the camera—and the ability of a photographer and photographic technology to capture it. Photogenicity, in this sense, is more nurture than nature. It is probably less of a measure of how attractive one looks than of how well someone has reconciled themselves to the particularities and limits of modern technology.

To understand this, let’s break down some pervasive assumptions underlying photogenicity. First: There is little universal understanding of who has it and who doesn’t. “To a surprisingly large extent, we disagree on who we individually think of as attractive” in photographs, Clare Sutherland, a psychology lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, in Scotland, told me. Psychological studies, including Sutherland’s own, have demonstrated that a person who is rated as very attractive in one photo might be considered much less attractive in another. “There’s going to be a lot of individual variation in how we make this judgment about whether or not someone looks photogenic,” Sutherland said.

That extends to ourselves too. In a 2017 study, Sutherland and a group of researchers found that, given a set of 12 photos of their own face, participants generally preferred very different photos of themselves to the ones their peers did. The same disjuncture in how we perceive our photographed face was also the subject of a 2014 study in Japan. In it, researchers took photos of each participant, then lightly modified them, increasing or decreasing the size of eyes and mouths. Participants were then given four photos of the same person’s face and asked to pick which one had not been modified. In the end, people were worse at identifying their real face than their peers’. We are, in other words, terrible judges of what we look like to other people. Thus, when we insist that we are not photogenic, we probably don’t know what we are talking about.

The study in Japan suggested that perhaps a person’s professed lack of photogenicity stems from their unfamiliarity with how they look on camera. The theory is intriguing—but it doesn’t account for the possibility that photogenicity might really be a kind of on-camera savvy. Photogenic people might have mastered their relationship with image-capturing devices. Models swear by the importance of angles, and there is some truth to the idea that how we orient our face in photos informs the final product. For example, photos taken from above tend to make people look trimmer, whereas photos taken head-on might emphasize the broadness and power of our body.

Sometimes this plays out involuntarily: Numerous studies since the 1970s have found that we tend to pose with the left side of our face, a phenomenon that Alessandro Soranzo, a psychology researcher at the U.K.’s Sheffield Hallam University, speculates might have something to do with brain chemistry. “Our right hemisphere of the brain is the one that is more involved in emotions,” Soranzo told me. And because the right hemisphere governs the left side of the face, “our left side is more expressive emotionally,” he said. Whether that actually translates into our left looking better remains a matter of debate, according to Soranzo.

Another factor that complicates photogenicity is the historical bias built into photographic technology. In the 20th century, Kodak calibrated the light and coloration of its photos according to a photograph of a white woman named Shirley. Black and brown people subsequently found that their skin did not show up accurately. While researching early references to photogenicity in newspaper archives, I encountered numerous articles that acknowledged this bias quite explicitly, including one in the Illustrated Daily News in 1934 proclaiming the camera to be “kindest to blondes” because of “their ‘photogenic’ coloring.”

When you understand the history of the concept, “you can see just how fluid and unstable the very idea of photogenicity is,” says Sarah Lewis, a professor of African American studies at Harvard and the founder of the Vision & Justice initiative, an organization that publishes research on visual culture. Photography is still not a level playing field, and, as Lewis has written, anti-Black bias lingers in many digital photos today. For example, cameras that add artificial light or optimize exposure tend to distort the skin color of Black people in particular. Using different kinds of lighting according to one’s skin tone, then, is key to creating the appearance of photogenicity.

That brings us to the last component of photogenicity—the person taking the photo. I was struck by a comment by Naima Green, an artist and a commercial photographer who often works with nonprofessional models. She told me that she encounters many subjects who tense up in front of the lens. “They’re so hyperaware of the camera that they want to make sure they’re doing everything right for me,” she said. “And when you are just more in the moment, I think that really changes what happens in the picture.” Instead of contorting people into rigid poses, Green prioritizes making people feel comfortable on set with her. The trick is in finding sitting or standing positions where their body can relax. It is a small tweak, but a telling one. We can all do this for ourselves, too, even when posing for a selfie.

[Read: How to have a realistic conversation about beauty with your kids]

The reality is that the people most often considered photogenic are probably also the ones who have repeated exposure to photos of themselves—say, models or actors. Sure, they may be considered conventionally beautiful, and they may be good performers who know how to work with a camera. But perhaps their greatest asset is simply how many reps they’ve put in. As a result, they are attuned to the camera’s tendencies, and they are relaxed in front of it.

Maybe those of us who are not professional posers just have to remember that photogenicity may be a skill you can work to improve, like any other. If we choose to, perhaps we can take so many photos of ourselves that we know our visage from every angle. We can learn the lighting that matches our complexion. We can master the poses that make us feel most like ourselves. At some point, we might cease to be surprised by the image looking back at us.