f we date British lockdown to 23 March, it seems to have taken all of four weeks before video meetings were identified as the cause of “Zoom face”, a sort of reverse Narcissus experience whereby contemplation of your own face leads only to dissatisfaction and despair. On the other hand, a happy ending – facial repair work – is possible. It may be superfluous to add that sufferers from this syndrome are, predominantly, women. “Are you suffering from Zoom face?” Grazia asked. “Looking at ourselves on video-conferencing calls is taking a toll on our faces and our minds.” While carefree male users were still chewing gum in glistening close-up, it emerged that women, including very young women, were experiencing agonies of self-consciousness in meetings via laptop, which were only exacerbated by the lockdown ban on hair and skin treatments. “I just look tired. Droopy, jowly, tired,” one Zoom face sufferer told Grazia’s Polly Vernon. “I’m literally always frowning,” another told Glamour magazine, where the writer concluded: “Just keep reminding yourself that as soon as lockdown is over, you can book in for as much Botox as you want. Just kidding.” Although it may sound similar to “bitchy resting face”, first diagnosed in 2013, Zoom face differs in not having being invented by a US comedian in order to satirise the ineradicable social expectation that women’s features be, at all times, cheerful and pleasant to look upon. On the other hand, since the entirely made-up bitchy resting face was promptly adopted by aesthetic clinics as a brilliant way to flog facial work to not ancient but still inadequately benign-looking women, maybe it hardly signifies. Both could be sorted with treatment. Reopened clinics are reporting a surge in inquiries. By last week, this Zoom-fuelled phenomenon had featured on Radio 4’s Today programme, one of whose male presenters sounded strikingly keen to normalise Botox for “the Zoom [young] generation”. His interviewee, 29-year-old Rebecca Reid, had sought treatment, persuaded by the sight of her own face in meetings. It was, she said, “seeing myself from all sorts of angles and realising I was starting to look older than I actually am”. Listeners will have gathered, even without the evidence, that Botox did the trick – at least until it needs topping up. If Today neglected only to supply potential clients with Rebecca’s star rating and her clinic’s phone number and prices, its lurch into QVC territory was nothing compared with a promotion in the next day’s Sunday Times where the banner headline “This is what a Botoxed feminist looks like” was splashed across the front page. Caitlin Moran, the admired and influential author of the bestseller How to be a Woman, had, she explained in an extract from her new book, changed her mind about Botox. To the point that she now reads like its most compelling world ambassador, the saviour who will lead women out of Zoom face to a brighter future; altogether an inconceivably valuable asset to an industry so long tarnished by images of – to pick just one Trump from so many – Jared Kushner. “I don’t look younger or hotter or more perfect,” Moran wrote. But then she’d wanted, unlike the young Today programme interviewee, to look “well slept and happy”. Botox, specifically, the “best Botox specialist in London”, had again done the trick. “Botox,” Moran says, “is the working woman’s facial mini-break. Botox does your relaxing for you. It takes a job off the list.” Her piece was swiftly retweeted by an enterprising clinic. Since countless feminists already do have Botox, just like feminists have facials, highlights and control pants, its laptop-accelerated normalisation among all age groups is arguably less interesting as a question of individual purity than as a triumph for an industry deeply dependent on women’s feelings of inadequacy. Nobody thinks Caitlin Moran has a duty to look more like Iris Murdoch. But it seems fair to wonder who benefits if, helped by successive endorsements, regular Botox comes to seem as routine (for people who can afford £200 per treatment) as hair-colouring, leg-waxing, brow-threading, as the chorus from lockdown confirmed, already are. Years ago, when Zoom face was still just face, Nora Ephron detailed in her essay On Maintenance the difference between the time-consuming stuff she designated “Status Quo Maintenance” and rarer interventions she categorised as “Pathetic Attempts to Turn Back the Clock” (in which Botox was included). If the idea that we now add a third category, anti-ageing treatments for the very young, and a fourth, the obliteration of unwomanly discontent, does not strike me immediately as an advance for civilisation, this could well be because I am both clinic-averse and physically way beyond repair. Without question, these innovations will be attractive to the many men who freely tell women, whether in the street or online, to cheer up/relax/smile/stop being such a miserable cow. Likewise, exultation at the BBC, given its historic struggle with the visible signs of ageism, will probably be mixed with righteousness. Finally some women seem willing to recognise, as the corporation always has, that nobody wants to see women look tired, tense, not fresh or happy – or, as it used to be called, older. How much did it have to spend compensating Miriam O’Reilly for thinking herself as employable as, say, John Simpson? With misogynistic ageism dealt with, maybe lockdown-induced excitement explains why dreary warnings about dodgy practitioners and Botox dependence have also been discarded. In Botox Nation: Changing the Face of America, Dana Berkowitz described some users’ addiction as “crack-like”. In 2017, she told the Observer’s Lucy Rock: “The problem for me is that in targeting younger women the doctors are trying to create this lifetime consumer.” The problem, three years on, is they seem very close to succeeding. • Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist