Zoom adds face effects so you can look your best during meetings

While Zoom was originally created as a serious meeting application for businesses, it has since become one of the most widely used services during the pandemic for anyone wishing to have a virtual conversation. As a result, the company has added more fun things, like weird backgrounds, to use for online family gatherings, friends chats and, well, for business meetings. And now, it has a feature called Studio Effects, which gives you the opportunity to add a variety of eyebrows, facial hair and lip color to your video image during Zoom sessions.

The feature, still in beta, is not really new – Zoom announced it in September 2020 – but this is the first time many Zoom users first discover this. It’s easy to find anyway. Start a zoom session and go to Video settings (found by clicking on the arrow next to “Stop video” at the bottom of the screen). From there, select “Background and Filters” and search for “Studio Effects (Beta)” in the lower right corner. (You may need to download the effects package first – go ahead, it only takes a minute.)

After that, you can influence any look you want. Ever wanted Groucho Marx eyebrows or a wicked goatee or bright green lipstick? It’s there to try. And you can set your face effects for just that meeting or for every meeting you’re in (which might not be a good idea if you think you might have a last minute job interview).

We have released Zoom to find out how widespread this new feature is (so far there are several staff members here The edge reported that they saw it in their Zoom applications). While this is a lot of fun, I hope Zoom will add hairstyles to its Studio effects – those of us who still suffer from pandemic hair (in other words being in a hair salon for about a year) will be very grateful.