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Once upon a time, mirrors were optional. You could avoid them if you wished — slide past the hallway glass, tilt your head away from the bathroom reflection, let days unfold without confronting your own image. Then 2020 arrived, and suddenly every laptop became a mirror. Not a flattering one, mind you. A wide-angle, pixelated, poorly lit magnifier of every pore, shadow, and angle you never wanted to meet.
Welcome to the age of Zoom dysmorphia, where professionalism is delivered side by side with a live self-portrait.
In the early days of lockdown, there was something almost charming about it: the novelty of peering into colleagues’ kitchens, the thrill of working in slippers. But as weeks became months, a new ritual emerged: the obsessive glance, not at others, but at oneself.
On Zoom, Teams, Meet — wherever the rectangles aligned — we discovered a cruel truth: cameras don’t tell the truth at all. They distort. Wide-angle lenses exaggerate noses. Poor lighting carves shadows beneath eyes. Laptop cameras perched too low transform jawlines into soft folds.
And so, the innocent work call became a daily exercise in self-critique. One client described it perfectly:
In Harley Street, I saw the fallout almost immediately. Patients began arriving with specific, oddly technical complaints: “My jawline disappears on camera,” “My eyelids look heavy on Zoom,” “I swear my nose has grown.”
The irony? Most of these “flaws” were camera artefacts, not reality. A distorted angle, a harsh light. And yet perception became reality — because when you see your own image eight hours a day, flaws that never existed start to feel permanent.
The phenomenon was so widespread it earned its own diagnosis: Zoom dysmorphia. Surgeons worldwide reported a surge in requests for eyelid lifts, necklifts, jawline refinements — procedures chosen not from mirrors, but from webcams.
This is hardly the first time technology has rewritten beauty standards. Hollywood once did it with lighting and lenses. Marilyn Monroe was famously photographed with filters of Vaseline on the camera to soften her skin. Greta Garbo demanded her “good side.”
Fast forward to today, and TikTok filters serve the same purpose, offering pixel-perfect illusions of symmetry and glow. The difference is that now, the filter has become the norm — and the unfiltered self, when confronted daily on a Zoom call, feels like a betrayal.
Even Saturday Night Live parodied it with sketches of women frantically repositioning lamps and stacking laptops on books for the “perfect angle.” The humour, of course, landed because it was true.
What fascinates me is how professionalism and vanity collided on screen. The boardroom once required polished shoes and pressed suits. The virtual boardroom required something subtler: good Wi-Fi, decent lighting, and a face that looked endlessly alert.
Here’s the paradox: a furrowed brow that signals concentration in real life appears as hostility on Zoom. Slight eye bags from late-night work read as exhaustion under the unforgiving glow of a webcam.
One client put it bluntly: “My job depends on me looking sharp on camera. But my camera is sharper than I am.”
In response, subtle tweaks became survival strategies. Botox to soften the frown that Zoom magnified into severity. A necklift to restore the jawline lost to downward camera angles. Blepharoplasty for eyes that always seemed tired, no matter how much sleep they’d had.It was no longer about looking younger. It was about looking present. Alert. Unfazed by the eighth call of the day. I often remind patients:
Because confidence is not just for boardrooms anymore — it’s for broadband.
Psychologists argue that no generation has ever spent this much time staring at itself. The selfie craze was already training us to fixate on angles, filters, and lighting. But selfies were optional, curated, shared on our terms. Zoom was different. It was mandatory.
Imagine giving a keynote speech while staring at your own reflection. That is, essentially, what the modern workday became. No wonder people began to question not just their features, but their identity.
And so we must ask: when did professional authority become tied to looking flawless on a webcam? Should a surgeon’s credibility depend on their jawline’s definition through a MacBook lens? Should a CEO’s strategy be judged alongside the brightness of their under-eyes?
Perhaps not. But in the silent economy of perception, the answer is already written. Just as women in boardrooms face harsher visual scrutiny, the digital boardroom has amplified it further.
— a rectangle of light that reflects not just our work, but our insecurities. And while the camera may distort, the pressure it creates is painfully real.
In Harley Street, my role is not to wage war on time, but to protect confidence from technology’s cruel exaggerations. To remind patients that their worth is not pixel-dependent. Yet, when a subtle adjustment allows them to log in without dread, to speak without distraction, to see themselves as competent as they know they are — then the scalpel, like the ring light, becomes a tool of clarity.
Perhaps one day, we will learn to mute self-view and simply get on with the meeting. Until then, we adjust, we enhance — and we continue to lead, one pixel at a time.
© 2025 · Beauty and the City by Dr. Dirk J. Kremer
Published: november 2025 · Harley Street, London
All rights reserved. Please do not reproduce or republish this article without permission.
