Zoom Dysmorphia Is Real, and I Have It Bad

Are we looking at ourselves too much? No, like, that's a serious question.

Maybe it's the fact that I'm in my "late" 30s now. Maybe it's four hours of Zoom meetings a day. Maybe it's both. But I genuinely did not care this much about my hairline — or my eleven line, for that matter — before the pandemic and, let's be honest, social media.

Because before we even get the crust out of our eyes in the morning, we're already watching seventeen videos of creators who are simply glowing. Do they have a filter on? Probably. Does that make us any less self-conscious? Absolutely not.

And the numbers back it up: cosmetic procedures in the U.S. have grown 19% since 2019, with liposuction, breast augmentation, and tummy tucks leading surgical procedures, and Botox and fillers dominating the non-surgical side. And then there's the TikTok rabbit hole of botched procedures: people dissolving filler, reversing lip jobs, genuinely grieving the face they had before. Jessi from Secret Lives of Mormon Wives comes to mind. It's a lot.

I think about my daughter watching me look at myself on a screen and wondering what I'm looking for. I don't know what the moral of the story is here, but I will say this: you're perfect the way you are, and maybe we all just need to go touch some grass — not for our nasolabial folds, but for all the girls who came after us.