The Guardian

From a pandemic to plastic surgery: how Covid changed the way we see our faces

Jane, a 40-year-old mental health professional from Cork, never worried too much about how she looked. But when her job went fully virtual, she found herself dreading Microsoft Teams meetings. Her face looked rounder, her nose looked bigger, and her top lip looked thinner than she’d ever noticed in the mirror.

“I’ve always thought I was attractive, and people would always compliment my looks in person,” she says. “But on video, nobody was saying how nice it was to see my pretty face.”

Eventually, this past June, Jane took matters into her own hands – or rather, her lips – and got her pucker plumped with filler. She was so pleased with the results, she plans to repeat the process on an annual basis.

As the pandemic corralled the masses into

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