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I had a call this week, nothing important, just a check in with a friend who moved across the country a while back, and for most of it I was not listening to a word she said. I was looking at the small square in the corner of the screen that showed my own face, tilted slightly from the angle of my laptop camera, lit by the pale glow of my desk lamp.
I did not like what I saw. That is the plain version of it. The angle exaggerated something under my chin, flattened my cheeks in a way that made my whole face look tired, and the lighting picked out fine lines I do not usually notice. I spent the better part of twenty minutes half present in a conversation I actually cared about, distracted by a version of my own face I did not recognize as mine.
Two mirrors, two people
Later that evening I stood in front of my bathroom mirror, the ordinary one I have looked into every day for years, and the face there looked entirely different. Not younger, not smoother, just more familiar, more like the face I carry around in my head as my own. Same features. Same person. And yet the gap between the two versions felt wide enough that I found myself wondering which one was actually closer to the truth.
I think the honest answer is neither, or both, or that the question itself is a little bit broken. A mirror flips everything left to right and I have spent decades adjusting to that particular distortion without noticing. A laptop camera sits below eye level and compresses the image in ways no mirror ever would. Neither one is a neutral witness. But only one of them feels like mine, and that has nothing to do with accuracy.
Why the camera version stings more
I have thought about why the camera face bothers me more than the mirror face, given that logically I know the camera is doing something strange with angle and light. I think it is because the camera face is the one other people see, or at least the one I imagine they are seeing, while the mirror face is only ever mine. There is an audience built into the camera version that changes how I receive it, even when nobody on the call has said a single word about how I look.
Nobody on that call mentioned my face at all. The only person critiquing it was me, watching myself watch myself.
The chin thing specifically
I want to be specific rather than vague about what actually caught my attention, because vague complaints are easier to spiral on. It was the area under my chin, how the low camera angle adds a slight fullness there that does not show up in the mirror or in photos taken from further away and roughly eye level. I have started noticing it on every call since, checking the small corner square more than I check the person I am supposedly talking to.
I tried propping my laptop on a stack of books once, to raise the camera angle, and it did help. The chin issue mostly disappeared. But I felt strange doing it, like I was rigging the results of an experiment rather than just being present for a conversation with someone I like.
What I actually want
I do not think what I want is a better camera angle, though I will probably keep using the books some days. What I want is to stop treating the small corner square as evidence of anything true about my face. It is one angle, one light source, one lens, compressed into a few inches of screen. It has about as much authority to define my face as a single unflattering photo taken at a bad moment, which is to say, not much, even though it does not feel that way in the moment.
- My video call face and my mirror face read as almost two different people.
- The low camera angle specifically distorts the area under my chin.
- Propping the laptop higher helped, though it felt like rigging the experiment.
- Nobody on the actual call commented on my appearance. I was the only critic in the room.
Trying to look at the person instead
On my next call, a few days later, I made a small deal with myself to look at the other person’s face on the screen instead of my own corner square, at least for most of the conversation. It was harder than I expected. My eyes kept drifting back to that little box, checking, adjusting, judging. But I caught it more often than I used to, and each time I caught it I moved my attention back to the actual person I was talking to.
I do not think I have solved this. I still do not love the face the camera shows me. But I am starting to understand that the face on the screen is not more real than the one in my mirror, or the one in old photos, or the one my friend across the country probably actually saw while I was busy studying my own reflection instead of listening to her.
