Social media scientist Dan Zarrella wanted to know what made people like a selfie on Instagram. After studying 160,000 images, he found out that there may be a recipe you can follow to get the most likes out of your selfie:

1. Use cool colours rather than warm colours:

According to Zarrella, photos that featured cool shades like blues and greens had more likes than warmer shades like reds and yellows. Nature-inspired selfies and selfies in Starbucks can do the trick.

2. Use these hashtags:

The popular hashtags #pretty, #boy, #daily, #girl and #hair had the most likes. Action tags, or tags that ask you to like a photo (#l4l, #likeforlike, #like4like, #tagsfolikes) or to follow an account (#follow, #follow4follow, #followme), also apparently drive more likes:

3. Don’t use fancy filters:

The best filter is actually #NoFilter, and selfies touted without filters drive more likes than those that have filters. Zarrella, however, found out that not all #NoFilter users are telling the truth: about 30% of them still use subtle filters like Valencia and Amaro.

Here are the Instagram filters arranged from most liked to least liked:

4. More tags, more likes:

Most people get annoyed by too many tags. But Zarrella found out that more tags actually drive more likes — that is until the tag count hits 30.

5. Don’t take a selfie while drunk:

When taking a selfie, remember that shooting sober is more popular than shooting drunk. #Drunk selfies get 40% lower likes than those without #drunk.

(Photos courtesy of Dan Zarrella, HubSpot)