Are You Suffering From Zoom Face?

It was during a Zoom consultancy session with a skincare specialist that I first noticed how horrifically wonky the teeth in the lower left front of my mouth are. I’d angled my laptop in a particular way so that my consultant might get the best view of my mush – higher than usual, in sunlight – I’d laughed at something she said, glanced at the screen as I did so and... dear Lord! The ugliness of those three teeth! How jagged and pokey and just grotesque they seemed! The rest of the consultation was lost in my mentally obsessing over the teeth, to the detriment of my open pores (why I’d Zoomed her in the first place). How had I never noticed before? How had I gone around, utterly unselfconsciously, opening my mouth willy-nilly and a lot, chatting and smiling and eating and yawning, completely ignorant of this epic facial flaw?

‘Polly: help. I need filler in my puppets,’ said my friend L, who is Italian and speaks excellent English, though occasionally specific words escape her. On our WhatsApp video call she indicates lines from the corners of her mouth towards her jaw.

‘You mean “marionettes”?’ I suggest – those deep creases that can develop in that area.

‘Yes: puppets!’ she says.

I peer at the screen. ‘You haven’t got any puppets.’

‘I have! I see them on Microsoft Teams,’ she replies. ‘Doesn’t show so bad on WhatsApp.’

‘My facial expressions are really off,’ says T. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I look so haughty!’

‘I just look tired. Droopy, jowly, tired,’ says M.

‘I can see frown lines developing, every time I Zoom,’ says Z, who is 28, line-free and mad. ‘Like, spreading and multiplying in front of my eyes! I’m going to have so much preventative Botox when we get out.’

‘In some lights, I look OK on video call,’ says C, ‘in others, I look dreadful – but which one is accurate? How do I tell?’

It seems every woman I know, and quite a lot I do not, has come down with a serious case of Zoom Face: the lockdown-specific, video-call-transmitted conviction your face is imperfect in ways of which you were once completely oblivious. But, now you know, you definitely need to fix ’em, with serums and LED masks, facial exercises and practising one-on-one video sessions with yourself so as to retrain your face into less haughty/moody/tired/drooping resting modes. All of which will just have to ‘do’ until the Botox clinics and cosmetic dentists surgeries reopen, at which point, presumably, they’ll be under such sudden pressure they’ll have to prioritise access like the supermarkets did, back when people were still hoarding.

So much time spent video conferencing – attempting to focus on what others are saying, while being perpetually distracted by the digital replication of our own faces – is negatively impacting our relationship with our appearance. Deeply. ‘This is an awful thing to say,’ whispers one friend on a rare, precious audio call. ‘But I’m beginning to hate my face for the first time in my life. Like: despise it.’

My heart breaks for her, but: honestly? I’ve had moments of feeling like that, too. The wonky teeth incident was only the last in a series of unfortunate Zoom-related revelations, during which I’d found reason to loathe pretty much every square inch of my face. I’ve only stopped now, after locating the auto touch-up setting on my Zoom app, which filters my face to a faintly creepy smooth-edged quasi degree of perfection. I struggled a bit at first, on both the feminist principles of doing this, and the potential implications for my already- shaken body image (how would I handle the chasm between this constantly filtered version of me and the reality, long-term?), but just couldn’t bring myself to turn it off.

Also: ‘Babe. Everyone’s got touch-up on,’ says my friend Z of the preventative Botox. ‘Leave it off and you’re like one of those cyclists who isn’t on steroids, when everyone else is.’

‘I have special lighting that I use specifically for Zoom calls,’ says my friend, the aesthetician Dr Sarah Tonks, who I itch to visit for Botox. ‘Comparison [aka the galley-view feature] is the thief of all joy. If you see other people looking amazing during lockdown, then compare yourself, you probably won’t come off too favourably, but that’s partly because the resolution on video calls is so low, it’s like they’ve got a built-in filter by the time their face hits your screen.’ And that’s assuming they haven’t switched on the actual built-in filter – which they probably have.

Some of us are certainly adapting to the demands of increased video calls better, and more quickly, than others – just as some of us found our good angles and acquired flattering mini iPhone halo lights to up our Instagram selfie game, back in the pre-corona era. There’s that highly addictive auto touch-up function. There’s Dr Tonks’ special lighting. And there’s the make-up. Lynne Sanders, founder of A La Carte London cosmetics, told me, ‘We’re seeing a bias in make-up sales towards concealers, bronzers and eyeliners, all of which we attribute to the brave new world of Zoom. We’re learning the tricks film and TV make-up artists have always known: the camera drains colour and flattens features, we need to bring back healthy tones and structure with bronzer.’

All the skin and haircare specialists with whom I speak are reporting huge upticks in sales on the kinds of products that matter most on Zoom. WOW’s root cover powder and Revitalash’s eyelash and brow growth serum are each reporting 40% sales increases since lockdown began, while beauty behemoth L’Oréal has experienced a 240% increase in online conversation around face masks (cosmetic, not medical); and Google searches on at-home Botox alternatives – such as Acmella oleracea, an essential compound of Venn’s star product, Revitalizing Lifting Mask – are sky high.

Which is great for those businesses – but how good is it for our minds? What are the deeper implications of all this on our mental health? Not good, according to Dr Miriam Liss, a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut, who specialises in body image. ‘In order to understand how video meetings may be affecting us, it is important to understand a psychological theory called “objectification theory”,’ she tells me. ‘This posits that living in a world where women’s bodies are consistently objectified has negative psychological consequences, because women begin to objectify their own bodies. This is called “self-objectification” and has to do with taking a third-person perspective on one’s body, which leads to body shame since, more often than not, our body does not meet our internalised standards of beauty and thinness.

‘This theory was developed in 1998, before the rise of selfies and Zoom calls, so things have only grown worse since then. Selfies are a constant opportunity to place oneself in a state of self-objectification. They also encourage people – most of the research has been on women – to compare themselves to others, even compete for likes and positive comments. My research found that women who tend to self-objectify are more likely to use photo-editing or to take many selfies before they post. These behaviours are related to increased feelings of depression – partially through a feeling of deception: if the selfies you are posting are not accurate reflections of yourself, compliments or likes may feel hollow. In our study, a sense of deception was related to feelings of depression.’

And what of Zoom calls? ‘No one has published research on this, since it is such a new phenomenon,’ says Dr Liss. ‘But based on what we know about self-objectification, as well as what people are anecdotally reporting about their experience with Zoom calls, we can draw some conclusions. Watching one’s own face during a Zoom call is putting oneself into an immediate state of self-objectification. All of the negative effects of self-objectification likely apply. This means that people are likely distracted during their calls by seeing how their face looks, and comparing themselves both to other people on their call and to their own idealised image of how they should look.

‘Instead of concentrating on meetings, people are likely wondering if they are getting a double chin (given the fact that people are stress baking/drinking and gyms are closed, a lot of people are worried about weight gain), or evaluating the severity of the bags under their eyes. Imagine if this is how it was in day-to-day life – imagine if every time we had a conversation with someone else in real life, there was a mirror on their shoulder. We would be so distracted, we would likely be unable to hold up our end of the conversation.’

If Dr Liss’s analysis is hard for you to hear – and it’s pretty hard for me to hear, I won’t lie – that’s because you know there’s truth in it.

So what can we do about it?

‘If I had to give one piece of advice, I would say turn off self-view,’ says Dr Liss. Turns out, there’s a Zoom setting that allows others to see you, but stops you seeing yourself (which I’d somehow missed in my eagerness to turn the auto touch-up feature on). To turn off self-view on Zoom: join the meeting, right-click your video to display the menu, choose: Hide Myself. While there isn’t an equivalent option on Microsoft Teams, I discover, while googling it, how you can turn yourself into a speaking potato, which could also do the trick.

So now you know what to do to cure your Zoom Face in one easy sweep: how to eradicate it from your consciousness altogether. Question is: will you? Will I? Or will we all just carry on with this self-sabotaging, body image-dismantling exercise, just as we keep on taking and posting selfies, long after having realised how deeply they’re hurting us?

See More: Life After Lockdown