The Objectified
How the Webcam Shows Non-Existent Appearance Flaws
Let's return to the COVID year of 2020 (did any of us think back then that those times would turn out to be less difficult than the years that followed?). The world is locked down. Hospitals are overflowing, and medical professionals are working themselves to the bone. The economy is in freefall. And in the midst of this, Shadi Kourosh, a dermatologist at Harvard Medical School, notices something unexpected: she and her colleagues are being flooded with patients complaining about their appearance. We aren’t talking about an allergic rash; people are overwhelmingly complaining about noses, chins, wrinkles, and under-eye bags they had never noticed before. In other words, in the middle of a global catastrophe, people suddenly decided to book rhinoplasties and brow lifts.
Kourosh decides to check if this is a local anomaly. She surveys 134 dermatologists across the United States. The result is unequivocal: the vast majority report a sharp spike in consultations regarding "defects" that patients discovered... on video calls. People arrive with specific complaints and frequently show Zoom screenshots as proof of the problem. Kourosh gives this phenomenon a witty name: Zoom dysmorphia [1].
The term proved accurate and quickly entered professional circulation. But for our purposes, it is crucial to understand exactly how video calls provoked this wave of bodily dissatisfaction. The cause lies at the intersection of optics and psychology. And we must start with how a camera is physically constructed.
The Camera Lies
A webcam is not a mirror. It operates differently, and the result differs from what you are used to seeing in your bathroom in the morning.
The front-facing cameras on laptops and smartphones are equipped with wide-angle lenses with short focal lengths. These lenses introduce barrel distortion—a geometric distortion where the center of the image swells and the edges compress. The nose, being closest to the camera, can appear up to thirty percent wider than it is in reality. The face as a whole appears rounder, and the eyes seem further apart. Any lens with a short focal length distorts facial proportions when shooting from a close distance.
Other factors compound this optical distortion. The flat, frontal lighting from the screen highlights skin texture, making pores, shadows, and unevenness—invisible under normal ambient light—glaringly obvious. The low resolution of the camera (and by no means does everyone use flagship devices for work) blurs some features while coarsening others. Video latency creates a feeling of unnatural micro-expressions; a person sees their own facial expression with a split-second delay, making it feel less "theirs." And what if the video freezes on an unflattering frame? "What a hideous face!"
The bottom line: the image on a video conferencing screen is not your face. It is an optically deformed projection of your face, systematically skewed toward unattractiveness. It is a distorted version that no one in the real world ever sees. But the person who stares at this projection for hours every day does not mentally correct for the optics. They accept the distortion as reality.
Anna and Her Nose
When the pandemic hit, Anna was twenty-seven and working remotely. Even back in college, she had been diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). With the shift to video calls, her attention fixated on her nose. "It loomed on the screen for eight to twelve hours a day," she describes. "It started living a life of its own, like something out of Gogol." Every video call turned into torture: instead of seeing her conversation partner, Anna saw her nose—too big, too wide, too noticeable. When her nose ceased to be the center of her anxiety, her focus migrated to her teeth. Then to the shape of her chin [2].
In Anna's example, we see the Dysmorphic Cycle—the second of the three vicious cycles described in Chapter 3. The mechanism here differs from that of the anxious Controller. While the Controller scans the window searching for awkward facial expressions ("What is my face broadcasting to others?"), the Objectified is concerned with appearance as a static fact: shape, proportions, texture. The Controller is preoccupied with the impression they make in communication ("What does my face say about me?"), whereas the Objectified is preoccupied with the aesthetics of their own body ("How does my face look?").
The Dysmorphic Cycle unfolds in three steps:
1. Selective attention to the "defect": Out of the entire image on the screen, the gaze snags on a single detail (the nose, under-eye bags, the shape of the jawline) and returns to it again and again. 2. Cognitive distortion (Emotional Reasoning): "I feel ugly, therefore I am ugly. I feel my nose is too big, therefore it is too big." The subjective feeling is accepted as objective fact. 3. Intensified scrutiny: The person returns to the self-view to check if it looks any better—and discovers that the "defect" is still there. (Naturally, it hasn't gone anywhere, because it is either being created by the camera lens or magnified by the intense focus of attention). The cycle is sealed.
For Anna, this cycle carried an additional burden—her pre-existing OCD, which provided the mechanism for compulsive checking. But a clinical diagnosis is not required to launch the Dysmorphic Cycle. Regular, multi-hour contact with an optically deformed image of one's own face is more than enough.
352,000 Surgeries
Anna's experience is one of multitudes. Data from the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (AAFPRS) reveals the scale of the phenomenon. Rhinoplasty became the most requested procedure in 2020. The volume of septorhinoplasties jumped by 20.5% compared to pre-pandemic levels. For patients under thirty, the volume of facial plastic procedures increased by 13.6%—including blepharoplasty (eyelid correction) and brow lifts. An astonishing 83% of surveyed AAFPRS surgeons cited "Zoom dysmorphia" as an unprecedented factor driving consultations [3].
The only category of procedures that saw a decline was rhytidectomy (facelifts), a surgery more common in older age groups. Those over sixty proved less susceptible to the pressure of video calls. The primary wave of consultations came from people in their twenties, thirties, and forties—the exact demographic spending the most hours on Zoom.
By 2025, the terminology had broadened. Dermatologists Sachin Mehta and Tarunpreet Narang proposed the umbrella term "digitized dysmorphia," encompassing Zoom dysmorphia, Snapchat dysmorphia (the desire to look like one's own filtered image), and the so-called "Instagram face"—a unified aesthetic standard spawned by the mass use of identical filters and cosmetic procedures [4]. All three phenomena share a core mechanism: a person compares their real face to a technologically manipulated version—and reality loses.
The Body as an Object
In 1997, psychologists Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts formulated Objectification Theory—one of the most influential frameworks in the psychology of the body and gender [5]. The core premise is this: when a person begins to perceive their own body primarily as an object to be looked at and evaluated from the outside, a process of self-objectification begins. The consequence of self-objectification is habitual body monitoring: a constant checking of how the body looks "to others." This monitoring drains cognitive resources, breeds shame and anxiety, and diminishes motivation for activities unrelated to appearance.
Fredrickson and Roberts described this mechanism in the context of cultural practices—advertising, media, and the male gaze. The self-view on a video call reproduces this exact dynamic, but in a far more relentless form. Cultural pressure is discrete: a commercial ends, a magazine is closed, a stranger's gaze lasts a second. The self-view is continuous. It is present throughout the entire workday. And—crucially—it comes not from another person, but from the subject themselves: you become the one observing yourself from the outside.
Duval and Wicklund's Theory of Objective Self-Awareness (Chapter 1) explains why a mirror triggers the comparison between the "actual self" and the "ideal self." Fredrickson and Roberts' Objectification Theory adds a vital dimension: chronic self-observation alters not just your current mood, but your habitual relationship with your own body. A person who spends hours every day looking at their face on a screen gradually begins to treat that face not as a part of themselves, but as an object subject to evaluation, control, and correction. This shift from a subjective position to an objective one is the very transformation described in the introduction as the central effect of the third communication channel.
Everyone is Beautiful Except Me
To people of this archetype, the faces of other participants on a video call almost always seem more "beautiful" than their own.
There is a neurocognitive explanation for this. Other people on the screen are not subjected to the same intense scrutiny as your own face. To your brain, a colleague's face is just one of many stimuli; your own face is a self-relevant stimulus of the highest priority (Chapter 2). You scrutinize yourself ten times harder than you scrutinize anyone else—and, predictably, you find ten times more "flaws."
Added to this is a systematic error we have already mentioned, one that famously makes social media users unhappy: upward social comparison. A person involuntarily compares themselves not to those who look worse, but to those who look better. In a meeting with twenty participants, the Objectified will find five faces next to which their own looks inferior—and absolutely zero next to which it looks superior.
The combination of self-objectification (via the self-view) and upward comparison (via the gallery view) creates a double bind. Your own window forces you to examine imaginary flaws under a microscope, while the gallery of other faces sets an unrealistic standard for comparison.
Daria and the Distortion
Daria, 32, is a university lecturer. She had always liked her reflection in the mirror—not in a narcissistic way, but in the most ordinary sense: she looked, saw no issues, and moved on with her day. But when she transitioned to teaching online, she noticed under-eye bags she had never seen before. First, she started applying more makeup before every lecture. Then, she invested in professional lighting. Finally, she booked an appointment with a cosmetologist.
The cosmetologist examined her and found absolutely nothing that required intervention. The bags were "well within the normal range for your age." Daria left unsatisfied. She was absolutely certain the problem existed—after all, she saw it with her own eyes. Every single day. For three to four hours at a time.
Daria was not seeing her face. She was seeing barrel distortion layered over flat, frontal screen lighting, layered over selective attention to the area around her eyes, multiplied by emotional reasoning ("I feel it, therefore it is true"). Four layers of distortion—none of which she controlled, and none of which she even knew existed.
What to Do
For the Objectified, the primary intervention is psychoeducation. Not a dry lecture on cognitive biases (though that helps), but the internalizing of one concrete fact: the camera is not a mirror.
This fact is simple, testable, and usually makes a profound impression. Suggest to someone who is obsessing over their nose on video calls to take a photo of themselves using their laptop camera from 30 centimeters (1 foot) away, and then take another photo from 1.5 meters (5 feet) away (or have someone else take it). The difference in facial proportions will be glaringly obvious. The nose that looked massive on the video call will return to its normal size at a standard focal length. This is "optics therapy," so to speak, very much in the spirit of Clark's video feedback method. For the Objectified, who has spent months treating their screen image as an accurate reflection, this simple experiment can be a turning point.
The second tool is restricting "mirror time." For the Objectified, the self-view operates on the exact same mechanism as mirror-gazing in Body Dysmorphic Disorder: the longer you look, the more flaws you find. Studies on mirror gazing in BDD show that a brief check (around 25 seconds) causes significantly less distress than staring for longer than ten minutes [6]. The self-view during a multi-hour meeting is not a ten-minute gaze; it is a multi-hour stare. Cutting off contact—hiding the self-view and turning it on only briefly to check the technical quality of the frame—is a disproportionately effective measure.
The third tool is an interoceptive anchor: shifting attention away from how the body looks to how the body feels. Place your feet flat on the floor. Lean your back against your chair. Notice your breathing. Self-objectification, by definition, pulls focus outward, onto the visual image. Interoception—awareness of internal bodily sensations—pulls it back inward. It is not a perfect antidote, but it is often a highly reliable alternative anchor: when the Objectified feels their gaze being dragged toward the self-view, switching to a physical sensation provides a grounding point that starves the dysmorphic cycle of fuel.
The Objectified and Others
The Objectified is easy to confuse with the Controller, as both anxiously stare at their rectangles on the screen. But while the Controller fears a social failure ("Do I look unconfident?"), the Objectified is at war with their own anatomy ("Why is my nose so big? Where did these dark circles come from?"). This distinction is critical for choosing the right "cure." The behavioral experiment (testing colleagues' reactions), which works wonders for the Controller, will be utterly useless here: the Objectified's problem isn't other people's judgments, but their own distorted perception. They need a different entry point: understanding the laws of webcam optics and systematically, methodically reducing their screen time.
For those whose preoccupation with appearance goes beyond mere discomfort and becomes a source of persistent suffering—intrusive thoughts about a specific "defect," inability to focus on anything else, avoidance of video calls or social situations, or seeking cosmetic procedures that bring no relief—this may be a case of Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD). This is a clinical condition affecting an estimated 1.7% to 2.9% of the population. For individuals with subclinical BDD, daily, multi-hour contact with a distorted image of their own face can be the catalyst that turns a background issue into a clinically significant one [7]. In such cases, hiding the self-view is a necessary but insufficient step. Professional intervention is required.
Current clinical guidelines strongly recommend that dermatologists and plastic surgeons screen for BDD prior to any aesthetic interventions—especially when a patient arrives with a Zoom screenshot as "proof" of their problem [8].
Contact with the Body
While the Controller's cognitive budget burns up in attempts to manage their facial expressions, the Objectified pays a different price: they lose healthy contact with their own body. Every hour spent in front of the self-view is an hour during which their face ceased to be a part of a living subject and became an object of scrutiny. And during that hour, body shame quietly eroded their self-perception.
It is impossible to eliminate barrel distortion because it is dictated by the physics of the lens (though flagship smartphone manufacturers attempt to correct it with software). However, it is incredibly easy to eliminate the self-view. It is the exact same recommendation given to the Controller, but with a different rationale. By hiding the window, the Controller escapes the exhausting need to manage impressions. The Objectified does something equally important: they simply stop looking at a face that, in reality, does not exist.
References
[1] Kourosh, A. S., Harrington, C. R., & Adinoff, B. (2020). Zoom dysmorphia: A new diagnosis in the COVID-19 pandemic. International Journal of Women's Dermatology, 6(4), 330–331.
[2] Based on a 2021 InsideHook report concerning individuals with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder whose symptoms were exacerbated by daily video calls. Name changed for privacy.
[3] American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (AAFPRS). (2021). Annual Survey: 2020–2021 statistics on facial plastic surgery trends.
[4] Mehta, S., & Narang, T. (2025). Digitized dysmorphia. Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology (JAAD).
[5] Fredrickson, B. L., & Roberts, T.-A. (1997). Objectification theory: Toward understanding women's lived experiences and mental health risks. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21(2), 173–206.
[6] Veale, D., & Riley, S. (2001). Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the ugliest of them all? The psychopathology of mirror gazing in body dysmorphic disorder. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 39(12), 1381–1393.
[7] BDD prevalence data according to: Buhlmann, U., Glaesmer, H., Mewes, R., et al. (2010). Updates on the prevalence of body dysmorphic disorder. Psychiatry Research, 178(1), 171–175.
[8] Current guidelines of professional plastic surgery associations (2024–2025) mandate BDD screening as a standard component of pre-operative evaluation.