Zoom Touch Up My Appearance isn't enough — here's the upgrade

If you've ever caught your own face mid-meeting and thought "I look tired", you've probably gone looking for the setting people mention: Zoom Touch Up My Appearance. It's genuinely useful, it's free, and it's already sitting in your settings. So let's start there — how to switch it on, what it does, and then the honest bit about where it runs out of road.

How to turn on Touch Up My Appearance in Zoom

It takes about fifteen seconds. Open the Zoom desktop app, click your profile picture in the top-right, and choose Settings. In the left-hand column pick Video. Under your camera preview you'll see a list of touch-up options — tick the box marked Touch Up My Appearance, and a slider appears next to it.

Drag the slider and watch your own preview. To the left, nothing's happening. To the right, your skin gets progressively softer. Leave it somewhere in the lower third and most people won't be able to tell it's on — which, honestly, is the whole point of any good adjustment. Once it's set, it stays on for every Zoom call until you change it.

Where Touch Up My Appearance runs out

Here's the part nobody tells you when they recommend it. The feature is fair and accurate at what it claims — it just claims very little, and it claims it in only one place.

It only smooths

Smoothing softens skin texture. It doesn't take years off, it doesn't cover greys, and it does nothing for the thing most of us notice first on a 9am call — tired, heavy eyes. You can push the slider all the way up and you'll still look like yourself on a long day, just with slightly fuzzier skin. Past the halfway mark it stops looking "rested" and starts looking smeared, like someone wiped a thumb across the lens. So the useful range is narrow, and within that range it can only do one trick.

It's Zoom-only

This is the bigger catch. The setting lives inside Zoom and nowhere else. The moment you join a Microsoft Teams stand-up, a Google Meet call, a Slack huddle or a Webex client meeting, it's gone — you're back to the raw webcam feed. Most of us aren't loyal to one app any more; a normal week bounces across three or four. A touch-up that only works in one of them isn't really solving the problem, it's solving a quarter of it.

The control is blunt

One slider, one effect. You can't ask for "a touch less on the skin but lift the eyes a bit". There aren't separate dials for the things that actually age a face on camera. It's a single knob labelled "blur more", and that's as much steering as you get.

The upgrade: a live camera that does the real thing

This is the gap we built FaceReady to fill. It's a live de-aging camera for Mac and PC, and instead of one smoothing slider it does the work properly — it softens the things that read as tired or older on a webcam, evens out skin without flattening it, covers greys, and gently rests the eyes so you don't look like the call caught you mid-yawn. A few years off, not a different person. You stay unmistakably you; nobody on the call should be able to point at what changed.

And it isn't bolted to one app. FaceReady is a virtual camera — it sits between your webcam and whatever you're using, processes each frame, and shows up as a camera you can pick. Zoom, Teams, Meet, Slack, Discord, Webex, FaceTime, OBS — if it lets you choose a camera, FaceReady is in the list. Set it once, and it's the same you in every meeting, not just the Zoom ones.

You get fine control too, not a single blur knob — dial the de-aging up or down, ease off the eyes, keep the skin honest. We're firm on one thing here: smaller is better. The best setting is the one nobody can tell is on. We're not in the business of smearing you into wax — push any effect too far and it reads as a filter, and a filter is exactly what you don't want on a work call.

The privacy question matters as much as the look, so here it is plainly. Every frame is processed on-device, on your own machine. Nothing's uploaded, there's no cloud round-trip, no account, and nothing's stored. Your face never leaves your computer. FaceReady runs on Mac and Windows.

So should you bother with the Zoom setting?

Yes — turn it on. It's free, it's already there, and a little skin-smoothing on a low setting genuinely helps. There's no reason to leave it off. Just be clear about what you're getting: a mild blur that lives in Zoom and nowhere else, with no way to fix the eyes or the years or the greys.

If your week only ever touches Zoom and "slightly softer skin" is all you're after, the built-in slider is plenty. If you bounce between apps, or you want the rested-eyes, even-skin, few-years-younger look that smoothing alone can't reach, that's the point where the native setting stops and FaceReady picks up — in every app, with proper control, and with your face staying on your own computer.