“Sorry about my hair today. It looks crazy.”
“Please excuse my wrinkles.”
“Just ignore my double chin.”
“Ugh, I look disgusting. I’m sorry.”
So goes the first five minutes of seemingly every pandemic-era Zoom meeting.
Atlanta business owner Shaun Chavis finds herself frequently apologizing at the start of video calls for her hair, which she has had chemically straightened for decades. After six weeks stuck at home, she now sports an inch of curly outgrowth at the roots. “I’m so sorry I don’t look 100 percent,” she said in a recent meeting with her entrepreneurial accountability group, stroking her hair. Chavis says she also uses a hack she learned from a friend: use a dark background “and kind of lean back a bit so my edges don’t look as kinky and you can’t really see where my hair ends and the background begins.”