Whether or not you get the “beautygate effect” depends on your ambient lighting. Due to the way the iPhone camera handles noise or really challenging situations with a bright light source coming at the camera over your shoulder, you’re going to see a lot of smoothing and a boost to the color of your skin tone in less than optimal lighting. Sometimes this can make your selfie look a bit like a watercolor painting.
That’s just bad photography. For goodness sake, if you want a good selfie, learn to work with the lighting and position yourself to your advantage.
The Pixel 2 will take the details it can detect and make “guesses” about what’s really there. While they are highly educated guesses and it does a really good job of making stuff up and giving you back the details your bad lighting took away, it can go too far and exaggerate every flaw and blemish and show things worse than they really are. But because this is so unflattering, people mistake it for “reality”. My goodness, if I were really as ugly as my Pixel 2 selfies make me out to be, I’d wear my pantyhose over my face.
If you don’t believe me about the Pixel 2, look around the net for some reviews that show what the Pixel 2 HDR software does to “remanufacture” the sky. Most of the time this remarkable camera software does pull off miracles to reproduce what you see despite horrible photography skills in action. I do love my Pixel 2 camera. But be informed and understand what you’re really seeing at work.