The selfie has become a daily routine for many young people.

It’s a natural part of social media and a way of showing their face to the world.

The self-taken photograph declares their personality and is used by thousands on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

But I have discovered there is also a burgeoning and bewildering variety of self-taken pictures.

A helfie, for instance, is of your hair, an usie (that’s us-ie) is of the snapper amidst a group of friends, a welfie shows a fitness work-out, a drelfie is taken whilst drunk, a shelfie is a snap of your bookshelf, a suitfie is a bloke in a suit, and a belfie, promoted by such celebrities as Miley Cyrus, is of your bottom.

Selfies can have another use as well as being Facebook fodder.

Vogue magazine has advised ladies trying on a new dress to take pictures of themselves in the changing room. They can then walk away and mull over whether they really want the item, check out whether it looks as good as it did on the hanger and send the snap to friends for an opinion. After all, says Vogue, the camera doesn’t lie.

Using it for fashion also has its expensive downside among young women: once they have been seen in an outfit in a picture shared on social media, they are reluctant to wear it again.

Which is why sales of skirts, tops and accessories are on the increase. A study for the children’s charity Barnardo’s, last month found that a third of women over 16 considered clothes old after wearing them three times or less.

After seven times, they are rarely worn again. Which is good news for the charity, which raised more than £10m from donated clothes last year.

The selfie, and all its varieties, are here to stay because camera phones have taken the photographic art into new realms of ease and popularity.

The first photograph was taken in 1826. More than 3.5 trillion have been taken since. Yahoo suggested that 880bn photographs were taken last year. Three years ago, it was estimated that 10% of all the photos that have ever been taken in history, had been snapped in the previous 12 months. More than 140 billion photographs have been uploaded to Facebook alone.

The selfie is a phenomenon that will be with us for many years. However, let me confirm that I do not discard clothes after three outings, whether I have been photographed or not, and that while I have taken the occasional selfie, the odd us-ie and, on one occasion, a shelfie, you can rest assured I shall never impose a belfie on anyone. I’ll leave that to Miley.