By Daisy Schofield

Photo: Elena Kulikova/Getty Images

Nika Motiie says she cannot go a day without “obsessively” photographing herself — to date, the 20-year-old has over 50,000 selfies in her camera roll. “I take them throughout the day, like almost every hour,” she tells me. “I’m trying to analyze how others see me so I know what they think I look like. It’s an exhausting cycle, but it feels like the only way for me to understand or control how I look to others.”

It didn’t always used to be this way. Motiie, an undergrad at the University of Arkansas, says that she used to be confident in her appearance during her middle school years — until she began building a presence on social media (she currently has 368,000 followers on TikTok). “I started seeing videos of very pretty girls who would go viral, with everyone in the comments talking about how perfect they looked,” she says. “Naturally, I just started comparing myself to all these videos and images online — my face structure just felt so different. That’s what made me question whether I was truly pretty.”

Over time, the confidence Motiie once had “just completely disappeared.” Nowadays, she says, “my face is all I ever think about.” Now, most of the time, Motiie avoids social situations. “Whenever I’m invited to go to plans, my first thought is: What do I look like today? And then I often make a last-minute decision based on whether I think I look good enough to be seen by others,” she says. If she had to estimate, Motiie says she’s canceled more plans than she’s attended.

These feelings led Motiie down “a path of self-hatred and low worth,” eventually prompting her to seek professional help three years ago. She is now on medication to treat depression and anxiety. “I don’t have an official diagnosis for body dysmorphic disorder,” she says, “but I’ve experienced the struggles that come with constantly feeling uncomfortable in my own skin.”

Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is a serious mental-health condition that affects how you see and feel about your body and appearance. Dr. Katharine Phillips, a psychiatrist at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian specializing in BDD, says it’s important to distinguish BDD from “normal” body-image concerns. “When we’re considering if someone is suffering from BDD, we usually ask: Is the person thinking about these perceived flaws for at least an hour a day (if they add up all the time they spend each day)? And do the concerns cause significant emotional distress or impairment in day-to-day functioning?”

Daisy Wilson, a 19-year-old biochemist from Oxford, England, posts openly on TikTok to her 37,200 followers about her struggles with “facial dysmorphia” — the term has been gaining traction on social media to describe this experience of having a warped perception of one’s own face. Other terms like “Zoom dysmorphia” and “Snapchat dysmorphia” have also emerged to describe the distorted self-image many people develop after staring at their face for too long via their front camera. Wilson’s self-image only started to improve about a year ago, she says, after about a decade of struggling with near-constant “horrible” thoughts about her appearance.

Like Motiie, Wilson would endlessly scrutinize perceived flaws. She recalls once taking a selfie and circling the parts she didn’t like on a drawing app. “I circled my nose, because it’s wonky,” she says. “I circled my eyes because they’re too small. I circled my lips, because they’re uneven.”

Her anxiety around her appearance was at its worst at school, when her face was on full display to her classmates. “People would be having normal conversations with each other, whereas always in the back of my head I was thinking: You look ugly. Your nose is wonky. They’re thinking about it. They’re looking at it.”