It's a Chinese phone, not simply made there but from one of the well-known Chinese domestic brands, and it's a high quality piece of kit.
As you'd expect these days it's a reasonably vanilla Android, without the cumbersome overlays that dogged phones a few years ago. It has a decent enough camera, and it is this that has provided a surprise. It has a "Beauty" mode. For selfies, and it makes a few tweaks in its software. Evening out skin tones and blemishes, enlarging the eyes very slightly, placing a highlight in the hair, and reducing the chin a bit. It lies, in other words.
So I've been playing with it, and even though I know it's lying, it's a rather useful aid to someone with a nagging feeling that they still look, you know, a little bit blokey. It takes a decade or more from my age, and manages to make me look acceptably enough feminine in my presentation to warm the old cockles of the heart, or something. I know HRT has filled out my face and given me lips because I can see it when comparing with past photos, but as we all know, only we know what the bloke looked like in the mirror and we can all see him sometimes looking back at us.
We trans people have a complex relationship with our own image, and a lot of us never manage to quite come to terms with it. I've had friends who've opted for FFS when they looked fine and returned looking frightful, just to lose his shadow, but my reaction has never been that extreme. It is however nice to see something of the girl in the mirror without the aid of the phone, and then to barely see him at all in the beauty-mode-enhanced version. I am no looker and I am not fishing for compliments, this is merely to express my pleasure at reaching a milestone of the mind. If the camera is supposed to lie, then I'm happy to have found one that does.
