'Computer Face,' 'Banana Roll': Old Wrinkles Get New Names

Oct. 8, 2010— -- Do you sit squinting at a computer most of your day? Ask a cosmetic surgeon, and he or she might say that sooner or later you'll suffer from "computer face."

This unfortunately named condition supposedly is caused by working in front of a screen for many hours a day. Let it go too long, and you may get 'turkey neck' -- loose skin around the jaw and chin -- along with wrinkles around the forehead and eyes.

"Computer face," it turns out, is just the most recent of many slang terms on a long list of not-so-pretty descriptions of our body's imperfections.

Take "banana roll" -- an unflattering reference to the excess fat under the buttocks.

"Marionette lines" are deep creases that stretch from the mouth down to the jaw line.

"Frown lines" or "elevens" refer to the wrinkles between the eyebrows, and "smoker's lines" are those creases that border the lips, supposedly from the trademark pucker that comes along with smoking a cigarette.

While none of these expressions are considered legitimate medical terminology, new words and phrases constantly are popping up in the cosmetic surgery lexicon to describe wrinkles here, extra fat there.

Computer face is only the newest term to come about -- though some doctors already support adamantly the idea of its existence.

Dr. Michael Prager, a cosmetic surgeon based in London, told the Daily Mail: "The women I am seeing at the moment have only been using computers at work for the last decade or so. But women in their 20s have grown up with them and use them for every single task. It will be completely different for them and I think the problem is going to become much, much worse. In another 10 years, they could be looking quite awful."

Other physicians, however, aren't so convinced that these words are useful to patients.