I turn the Camera app on and look at my reflection peering back at me. I don’t really know why I do it—sometimes I have the idea that I’ll take a selfie since my makeup looks nice, other times, because I think I have something stuck in my teeth. Sometimes, just sometimes, I do it because I think it’ll be fun to pick myself apart until the shreds of my flesh melt into the ground like bonito flakes. Sometimes it is fun. Sometimes.

Depending on how committed I am to self-flagellation, the camera I choose will be different. The front-facing camera is reserved for the bravest or most self-loathing moments: I don’t like how I look inside the front-facing camera, so drooping and haggard, my face bloated and porous like a pumice stone shoved into a sweater. The Instagram camera is marginally better, less intrusive, less intent on discovering all your corporeal flaws. Of course, the back-facing camera is my typical choice—more flashback to hide any dark spots or texture, nature’s foundation. But TikTok, with its litany of filters and magic wand of smoothing tools, understands me the best, letting my face be what I want it to be. Who is this beautiful princess peering, mouth agape, into the camera? I think I could be perfect when I look at myself through its lens. It’s not affirmation as much as the absence of scrutiny, dedication to the sensitive part of light-sensitive capture, its own kind of embrace.

Looking glass, meet Alice; she can be anything inside this tunnel of cameras, turning bone into dough and flesh into gel, features bending and breaking in every possible formation. Smile white and wide, jaw shaved down to a triangle, nose whittled into a thin flute and hooked at the end. Instagram face is no longer novel in this day and age—what I’m chasing is something even more fluid than 5.0 cc of hyaluronic acid. I want to be every woman I see inside the funhouse of my algorithm, who all seem more confident and powerful and capable of being loved than me. People on TikTok say that the front-facing camera makes you look worse, that the retinas of the eye don’t scrutinize as much as the creation of Tim Cook and his elves. Of course, Tim Cook wants to scrutinize, and I give him my face at every angle, hoping that if I peer into his abyss I’ll find some affected kind of love at the bottom of the well. Looking glass, do you see Alice, with your green eye? Do you like what you see? Do you want to keep it and pocket it, follow it and analyze it? I imagine my face sitting at the bottom of the cloud with the others, scraps of features piled together. I wonder how my face stacks up against the others.

I think my face is soft and round, like a dumpling. I know this because one of my father’s ex-wives used to call me that. Wife number two, who was beautiful and protective of her beauty, with a jawline that she massaged to a fine V-shape, the pinnacle of envy by Chinese beauty standards. She would coo to me: dumpling head, dumpling head. The nickname felt, at the time, like being hit repeatedly in the back of the head with a shovel—do you want to go shopping with me, dumpling head? Do you want to get ice cream? At twelve years old, no one wants to be perceived at all, so the idea of being perceived as a sack of pork and gluten was enough for me to contemplate climbing to the top of the Pearl Tower and just fucking jumping off. I check sometimes to see if it’s true, pinching my cheeks to see which camera might be most accurate. Really, I don’t know what my face looks like anymore. It could be anything. I’ve examined my own face in so many ways, stretched my features through every possible corporation’s technology, I no longer have any idea of what I really look like. I catch myself in the reflection of a shop window and see one blurred haze. I think that feels like the version I understand the most. One sodden, compressed jumble of lines thrown together. I feel an intense sense of relief when I see this censored version of my face; it makes me less intent to think about gua sha, retinol, jaw straps, anti-aging straws, masseter Botox.

The more evolved part of me, the one that reads books and volunteers and tells my friends that they cannot compare their bodies to celebrities’ unspoken secrets of private chefs and retouching, knows that none of this matters. I don’t care, I tell myself. But I have a soup of words trapped inside my dough head: Mewing mogging looksmaxxing Matt Rife looks like he won a sheet metal eating competition. Long philtrum low dimorphism dentalfacial development bone mass. Military beauty tradwife culture rise of conservatism. Bigger smaller bigger smaller sharper softer flat. No, I don’t care about any of it. I think. I look back at the front facing camera, where the shadows under my eyes look purple and my face appears as though I’ve swallowed a year’s worth of sodium in one night. I tell myself that a good life is one of lost sleep and something nice to eat. Maybe I’ll believe that today. Tomorrow remains to be seen. I turn the camera off. ◼