It’s a sunny Friday afternoon on the Brooklyn Bridge, yet Tarsila Ferreira is proudly holding what appears to be the shaft of an umbrella. Attached at the top: her smartphone.
It’s a selfie stick, which the 22-year-old tourist from Boca Raton just got as a gift that morning.
“We’ve had a guy point at us and say, ‘Hey, that’s so cool,’ ” says Ferreira, who was traveling with her family and boyfriend.
“I’ve already taken probably 500 selfies today.”
The selfie-stick phenomenon, which got its start in Asia, has landed on American shores, and this holiday season it’s hard to walk through Times Square, Rockefeller Center and any other tourist attraction without seeing the new gadget lifting 3 feet above the crowd.
The design is simple: A long, extendable metal rod clasps onto a smartphone at the tip. Most sticks extend three or more feet, allowing for a wider shot and a higher angle that can include more people, landscape and — oops! — photobombers. While basic selfie sticks require a camera timer to take a shot, the fancier versions come with Bluetooth remotes or handle buttons to snap the shutter.
“You can see yourself, and you look prettier,” says Ferreira, referring to the increase in control the stick gives the picture-taker, who is no longer impeded by the limits of the human arm.
Another plus?
“Instead of asking everyone to take pictures for me, I can take them on my own,” says Lorenzo Adami, 24, of Modena, Italy, who was recently wielding a selfie stick in Rockefeller Center. He’d also toted the device to Ground Zero, Central Park and the Museum of Natural History.
In November, Time magazine heralded the selfie stick as one of the greatest inventions of 2014. Pop star Beyoncé takes one for a spin in her latest music video, “7/11.” And Selfie on a Stick — a local company that sells the device online and at select Nordstrom and Opening Ceremony stores — has seen a 3,000 percent growth in sales in November alone. They’ve sold out of their Nordstrom stock three times already this season.
“We thought that it would just be a great addition to the American market,” says Jacqueline Verdier, 31, co-owner of Selfie on a Stick. She and her best friend and business partner, Dominic Suszanski, 32, discovered selfie sticks earlier this year while visiting Hong Kong.
“It’s funny to put your phone on the end of the stick, but at the end of the day we have great pictures,” says Verdier, noting the difficulty of capturing a scenic selfie at arm’s length.
Verdier, who works in real estate, and Suszanski, who works in finance, brought the stick back to Manhattan and, seeing a niche in the US market, decided to sell their own.
The company launched in July, and Verdier says they’ve sold a total of 7,000 — 85 percent of those sales in the past three months alone. The stick, which extends from 9 to 42 inches, retails for $20, plus $10 for an accompanying Bluetooth remote.
Other versions priced from $6 to $60 are now sold at retailers that vary from Wal-Mart to Urban Outfitters, and extreme-sports enthusiasts can get a similar GoPole to attach to a GoPro camera, bringing selfie sticks to beaches and ski slopes.
But not everyone is thrilled by the sight of early adopters wielding the metal sticks like lightsabers.
“I think they’re ridiculous,” says Ryan Roberts, 25, who was recently walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. “It takes the fun out of taking a selfie. It makes it too easy.”
The “narcisstick” also takes self-obsession to new heights — not an easy task in a year that kicked off with the Oscars selfie seen round the world, and ended with Twitter officially declaring 2014 the “Year of the Selfie” based on trending tweets.
“It’s really gone too far,” says Jen Collins, 41, of Iowa, who was recently in Times Square posing for selfies the old-fashioned way with her daughter. “It’s almost like a ‘Saturday Night Live’ joke.”
Anyone walking around with a prop to take pictures of themselves is a tool.
- Gregory Davis
For time-strapped New Yorkers, the stick can also serve as a 3-foot-long barrier that impedes traffic in congested areas.
“Anyone walking around with a prop to take pictures of themselves is a tool,” says Gregory Davis, 40, who works for a tech marketing firm in Midtown.
Diane Gottsman, a national etiquette expert, warns against using the self-portrait tool in the wrong environment.
“[It’s] going to be one more opportunity for us to be a little addictive when it comes to taking our selfies,” says Gottsman. “When you’re with your girlfriends at a birthday party or celebration, fine . . . but you don’t want to use it in your office.”
In an attempt to regulate the growing market of selfie sticks, South Korea cracked down on vendors last month. Selling an “unregulated” Bluetooth selfie stick in the country can now result in a $27,000 fine, or up to three years in prison, AFP reported. The ban aims to make sure the Bluetooth selfie sticks do not disturb other communication devices.
“Other selfie sticks out there aren’t coming from factories that are certified for the Bluetooth technology,” Verdier says. “The crackdown in Korea, it’s legitimate.”
In Manhattan, skeptics of the narcisstick often change their tune when they see the quality of the shots — even if it does mean drawing the ire of others.
On the Brooklyn Bridge, Maria Alarcon, 28, of Miami, scoffs when asked if she’d use a selfie stick with her friends, adding that she would refuse to hold the embarrassing device. “I just think it would be funny,” says Alarcon.
But minutes later, her friends agree to try out the gadget.
As Alarcon hams it up, passersby stare, but she’s too busy looking at herself in the photos to notice.