Plastic Surgeons Have More Clients. Doctors Blame Remote Control And Zoom For Everything

2024 Author: | . Last modified: 2024-01-10 03:12

The American specialized edition "Facial Plastic Surgery & Aesthetic Medicine" published material under the headline "During the pandemic, the demand for plastic surgery has increased." Experts cite statistics, according to which over the past six months, the number of patients visiting clinics for cosmetic correction has increased manifold. The reason for these calls deserves a separate mention: people do not like the way they look in video conferencing. Details of this phenomenon are in the column of Nikolai Grinko. Self-isolation and remote work forced a huge number of people to communicate via video. And some of them decided to tweak their appearance just because they don't like the way they look on screen. By the way, doctors say this has happened before. For example, in 2019, 72% of plastic surgeons had patients looking to change their appearance to match their own selfies on social media. Selfies are almost always processed: various filters are applied to them, with the help of special applications they remove minor skin imperfections, correct facial contours, body proportions and much more. But video conferencing apps do not allow image adjustments. In 2020, users began to see themselves more often in dynamics and without processing, and this caused massive dissatisfaction with their own appearance. Since the most popular video conferencing application is Zoom, the phenomenon is called "Zoom dysmorphia". Doctors say that the level of dissatisfaction with one's own appearance correlates with activity on social networks: the more active a user is, the less he likes his own appearance. And despite the fact that cosmetic surgery is a multi-million dollar business, professionals urge you not to get carried away with corrections. They even turned to photographers and cameramen to explain why we don't like our own face in video chat. We need to press on the screen or keyboard, and we cannot position them far away. Therefore, manufacturers build wide-angle cameras with a short focal length into gadgets so that the face and a little of the surrounding environment fit into the frame. But for portraits, this is a real disaster, as wide-angle lenses distort the proportions! The nose becomes larger, the distance between the eyes changes, while the head, on the contrary, flattens and stretches vertically. On different cameras, this effect is noticeable to varying degrees, but it is always there: on the screen you always see absolutely not what others see when they look at you live. Compare two photographs taken with a short throw and a long throw lens: it seems that they are generally two different people. Look at your reflection in the Christmas tree ball - the front camera sees you in much the same way. Trying to surgically correct a living face so that it looks correct on a smartphone screen is an absolutely pointless and very strange task. Maybe this whole story with Zoom dysmorphia will force gadget manufacturers to at least try to fix the situation? You can, for example, programmatically correct the image from the front camera so that the picture from it is a little more consistent with reality. This method, of course, will not give an ideal result, but at least it will reduce the number of potential patients in plastic surgery clinics. Though