'Nano Banana' saree trend: selfies become 90s Bollywood posters as India tops usage

Punjab First News · 17 September 2025, 5:30 PM

A silk saree with gold work on display at Dilli Haat — A saree on display at Dilli Haat, New Delhi (file photo) (Ekabhishek / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

In September, Instagram and other platforms were flooded with vintage-style saree portraits. People were using AI to turn ordinary selfies into images that looked like 1990s Bollywood film posters.

The pictures were made with Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash Image model, nicknamed "Nano Banana". Launched in August, the tool first powered a craze for miniature 3D figurines of users before the saree trend took over.

David Sharon of Google DeepMind said India was the No. 1 country for Nano Banana usage. On the back of the trend, the Gemini app reached the top of both the App Store and Google Play charts in India.

App analytics figures showed Gemini was downloaded about 414,000 times in India on September 13 alone, up from around 55,000 on September 1.

Cyber experts urged users to be careful about uploading personal photos. Google says images made with the tool carry a visible watermark and a hidden marker called SynthID.