New Delhi, Sept. 17 -- Google's Gemini "Nano Banana" phenomenon converts ordinary selfies into highly stylised images, from glossy 3D figurine portraits to retro, 90s-Bollywood saree looks. The feature set powering these edits is described as a rebrand of Google's Flash image models (Flash 2.5 for Nano-style edits; Flash 2.0 for some saree variants). The viral appeal comes from easily produced, cinematic outputs: chiffon drapes, grainy textures, warm golden-hour lighting, and exaggerated cinematic framing. That ease of creation is also what turned a playful experiment into a wide social trend on platforms such as Instagram.

Google says images created or edited with Gemini include an invisible SynthID digital watermark and metadata tags t...