To be annoyed that no one has ever told me I look like an actual sea monster in real life?

Thanks for this thread OP - I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much!

I’m also very relieved that I’m not alone in struggling with my onscreen image. Other people seem to look like their normal selves, whereas I look like something usually seen carved in stone on old churches, with the added attraction of nostrils as huge and luxuriant as jungle caves

I have the following masks which i may deploy for my next facetime chat

Horses head
Morph mask
Bart Simpson

Either one of them would be an improvement.

@DaphneFanshaw I am the same! (But my dad is 84 )
This is why I have my webcam covered over. It's for my children's privacy, honest!

Ah, all my colleagues know I'm a hag anyway.

I always thought my parting was slightly off centre but on zoom it looks like it's severely to one side. I'm trying to move it more to the middle now but it doesn't want to go there.

Thanks for the laugh people

Just send an email round to all your colleagues. "Apologies to anyone in a teams meeting with me, I seem to have set my picture to a blobfish and can't work out how to change it. IT are so busy supporting us whilst working at home, I don't want to bother them with trivial issues like getting my camera working again."

Oops... Massive link fail!

I found out I had a slight lisp when I hear my voice played back.
I don't know if I always sound like that or it is just my posh phone voice.
I genuinely can't hear it in normal conversation!

And I also look like jabba the hutt because my laptop/camera is quite far away to the side of my big screen, and the angle turns me into a massive pyramid.

Also worth noting that some call softwares and webcams flip the image horizontally, so everything looks back to front.

Most people hate the way they look when they see this, because it's the reverse of how you see yourself when you look in the mirror. It looks unfamiliar and therefore unpleasant.

[[https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/03/why-selfies-sometimes-look-weird-to-their-subjects/359567/ Article about this here]]

However, what I particularly hate about it is that what you look like on those flipped cameras IS what you look like to everyone else... what you think you look like is not what you look like.

Ugh.

.

I look like my Dad in a wig.

my eyebrows seem to disappear entirely on camera, I look like a thumb

I love you all, i haven't had a proper laugh from a MN thread in ages.

Yes to what you're all describing. Personally though my difficulty seems to be realising that those little squares of moving and talking heads are Actual Live People Who Can See Me. I repeatedly lose my train of thought mid sentence as, looking around my room, I've spied something that needs to be dusted/adjusted and just kind of... stop talking.... pause.... look back at my computer, only to realise they're waiting for me to finish.

MysweetAudrina - is your colleague Nigel Farage?! 😂

I have been facetiming my parents and brother, I put make up on and do my hair just for it, but as soon as I appear on the screen all I can see is my late Nan when she was 96.

I renewed my passport photo a while ago and I really pulled out all the stops with hair and make up, wore a nice top, in the actual mirror I thought I looked pretty good.. But lo and behold the picture that came back-yep-it was my Nan.

Ugh

I'm finding this thread hilarious. Just be thankful that you weren't in your boxers with the camera angled at your crotch like one of my colleagues last week

Why did no one tell me I looked like this????

Because we all look worse.

bobbin love it.

I sound like a strangled cat which gets worse when I'm stressed. I have a 1-2-1 Skype meeting with my line manager tomorrow and not looking forward to it (and that's not taking into consideration that I look and feel that something the cat brought in before being strangled...)

Fortunately I am spared the use of webcam and any conferencing is done by voice only, due to the nature of my job. For this I am very thankful. The downside is that, in my own head, my voice is a fairly low-pitched, moderately accented, normal voice; in reality I sound like Lily Savage on helium.

I blink. All the time. I'm amazed nobody has ever commented on it. And I have the biggest under eyebags of anyone in our team Zoom meeting.

I'm sure the positioning of your tablet/laptop makes a difference. Make sure you are not looking down into it - stack it on some books or something. Everyone looks jowlier when they look down.

I had a zoom meeting yesterday with a bunch of people who seemed to have massive nostrils but I think it was the looking down thing.

The right and left sides of my face belong to two different people.

The eyes are slightly out of kilter and slightly different sizes, the nostrils are different sizes and my mouth is weird as my left side seems happier than my right.

My hairline differs either side of a central right leaning curl, there's slightly more grey on my right than my left and my eyebrows are different lengths, with my right slightly longer and stragglier than my shorter neater left.

My double chin is also overtaking my actual chin. 😳

My face looks like a big round ball in comparison to others people's when caught on camera. Very bloated look.
I also seem to have a very small mouth ( perhaps it's because of my puffy pink head?)