Digital Distortions: Reflections on Zoom and Body Dysmorphia

A different face greets me each morning. Some days, it’s an attractive one, kempt and confident. It returns my raised eyebrows, my pleased smile. Occasionally, the face is blurry, with dull, listless hair and exhaustion smudged under its eyes. But most mornings, lately, the visage horrifies: a slack of wan shock, comically elongated.

I joined a Zoom accountability group with some friends in the height of lockdown, when I wasn’t writing anything except journal entries about how I wasn’t writing anything. We’re still doing it. Their waiting faces on my screen offer enough peer pressure to get me up before sunrise. There’s rarely much talk. We tip coffee mugs at one another; then I watch myself write my novel. Just as I’m watching myself write this. In my little apartment, with my terrible grainy coffee, I’m suddenly too aware of myself. I don’t look like I think I should. My facial hair is a sudden scraggle, and there are unprecedented wrinkles in my forehead. One friend, in Colorado, is reading, his eyes moving across his screen; the other, in Chicago, is writing in his notebook. They look like they always have in real life, but my face is so grotesquely wide that it makes my heart pound. And yet I can’t look away. I take a breath. I try to remind myself that I can’t trust what I’m seeing.

We’ve spent quarantine in faulty mirrors, sparking negative feedback loops. I wanted to understand what was happening on my Zoom calls, so I spoke with Dr. A. Shadi Kourosh, a professor of dermatology at Harvard who coauthored a study on what she calls Zoom dysmorphia. She told me that this new trend arose during the pandemic: “We had thought that patients would only be utilizing telemedicine for emergencies, but a lot of the consultations were for people concerned with more cosmetic aspects of their appearance,” she said. “The message was ‘I look terrible.’ And it really seemed out of proportion to what I could see.” Dr. Kourosh surveyed over a hundred peers: 86 percent reported patients citing their appearance on video conferencing as a reason for seeking cosmetic procedures, and most of the procedures were from the neck up.

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