The rise and fall of videophony (p. 147)
Even with high-end TPs’ high-def viewer-screens, consumers perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable. […] The proposed solution to what the telecommunications industry’s psychological consultants termed Video-Physiognomic Dysphoria (or VPD) was, of course, the advent of High-Definition Masking
Context
Shown their own faces, ordinary consumers develop a diagnosable horror at their own appearance, and an industry is born to mask it: the theme's shame-logic stated as mass sociology — everyone is Improbably Deformed once they actually have to be seen. U.H.I.D. takes the same equipment and inverts the sales pitch: hiding worn openly, as identity instead of enhancement.