The silver lining to isolating during the coronavirus pandemic is that I’ve gotten significantly hotter.

I glow throughout Zoom video calls and FaceTime catchups, since I’m no longer wearing thick foundation or breathing in excess pollutants. Taking a break from hot tools and heavy bleach has left me with perfect mermaid hair. And now that I don’t have to factor in a commute, my day simply flows from one yoga practice into another, broken up only by the small nibbles I take of a single square of dark chocolate.

Now that my enemies have closed this tab, let’s be clear: Appearance-wise, things could not be worse.

I’ve hit week five of self-isolation, and my physical form has taken on the qualities of a porcelain doll stored for many moons in a damp attic—stiff, cobwebby, inexplicably sprouting long hairs. While other people report cracking open some kind of personal smog cocoon to reveal their untamed natural beauty, quarantine has only served to remind me that my everyday makeup look involves a tremendous amount of trompe l’oeil visual deception.

Left alone inside my home, I could lie and say I grew to be more accepting of my natural appearance during quarantine and now devote my time to baking sourdough bread for my neighbors. But this would not be true, and the reason is telework software. Thanks to the omnipresence of Zoom and FaceTime, I am constantly, literally, faced with myself.

I catch my own eye in the upper-right-hand corner of our screen and squirm. I try to subtly change angles while holding a conversation with 13 people. I try to temporarily mimic the effects of plastic surgery by sucking in my cheeks and widening my eyes. I wonder, “Is this what I really look like?”

Life has turned into one never-ending selfie.

The combination of work-from-home slovenliness and the unforgiving Zoom viewfinder is a self-esteem free-fall. In the mirror just before a 7:30 a.m. call, I looked rested and, if nothing else, clean. But in my Zoom reflection moments later, I see my eyes look both beady and strangely dazed. My pores are Russian dolls, with smaller pores residing inside of them. My face seems expansive and craterous, like something a thrill-seeking athlete would walk across without protective gear in an Oscar-winning documentary.

Offline, things fluctuate. Sometimes catching my reflection in a mirror these days is a borderline biblical experience—I feel that a hoard of my enemies has risen up against me and are pursuing me with great speed; I pray for deliverance. But other times, growing adjusted to my actual face without giant bat-wings of black eyeliner flapping up towards my temples, I feel like my own movie boyfriend, reaching out, placing a wet-from-the-shower hand on my cheek. “You’re even more beautiful without makeup,” I whisper to myself, fogging up the mirror.

This fantasia of personal acceptance shatters every time I look into a front-facing camera. Make no mistake—it’s a privilege to be able to work from home, with access to technology that lets me do my job remotely. But even the most luxe quarantine situation comes with a peculiar sort of hell. Between meetings, virtual happy hours, and the emergence of Zoom dating, we are spending hundreds of hours on video conferencing software.

The constancy of Zoom—and Google Hangouts, and FaceTime, and House Party, and that aging former beauty queen of the video conferencing world, Skype—means that, for all intents and purposes, your entire day is spent looking in a mirror.

This cannot be psychologically healthy.

It doesn’t help that Zoom video calls at Glamour have the aesthetic of a YouTube lifestyle guru convention. My colleague Shanna Shipin wears jeans (with shoes?!) every single day. West Coast editor Jess Radloff appears to be beaming in directly from one of those commercials for people who only feed their pets food that humans could also eat. She wears a chunky sweater and gently rests her manicured fingers on her photogenic cat. A halo of light seems to follow digital producer Khaliha Hawkins wherever she goes. Commerce writer Talia Abbas lifts a mug of tea. “I want that mug,” I think. “And I want her skin.”

Sure, with some apps, it’s possible to cover up or minimize your own image. But then you would have no idea what other people were seeing, and you’d lose the illusion that you could control your appearance by tilting your head 10 degrees! You could turn your camera off completely, but then your coworkers will be left to assume you’re Zooming from your bathtub. Better to find the best light, the best angle, and accept that your entire personal and professional life now takes place in the mirrored walls of a Target changing room.

So I pacify myself with this thought: No one else is looking at me. While I’m staring at the corner of my screen, wondering if I’m really cut out for a life of human interaction, other people are doing the same. No one can see that my eyes are locked, in horror, on my own reflection. Everyone else is just looking at themselves on Zoom calls too.

They are—right?

Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.

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