The Disappearance of Interesting Faces

#TransparentTuesdays

 Why everyone is starting to look the SAME.

Hi friend,

“Why does everyone want to look the same?!”

My friend recently asked this question while we were talking about the epidemic of Botox and fillers being used to “fix” the very same unique facial features that we as a culture once said gave a person “character,” and made them compelling and attractive.

To be fair, we do actually know why people want to look like everyone else. 

People who conform to society’s (strict and oppressive) beauty and body ideals are given automatic access to many advantages and benefits, while people who fall too far from this standard are penalized, punished, and forced to face discrimination and marginalization. Given that, it’s not really a mystery why so many people spend good time and money trying to more closely conform to the rules of conventional attractiveness. 

What I find slightly more mysterious is why our rules for “conventional attractiveness” have recently come to be defined by the erasure of anything interesting or unique about a person’s appearance.

It wasn’t always like this. 

The physical trait I’ve been complimented the most throughout my life is my smile, for example. 

I personally love my smile, and I like to think people are complimenting something about my energy or authentic way of showing up in the world when they compliment it, rather than just responding to the particular shape of my lips and teeth… because honestly the latter just feels weird.

But if we were to talk only about the particular shape of my lips and teeth, then it would be accurate to say I have what’s called a “gummy smile,” meaning you can see a good amount of my upper gums when I smile. 

And while visible gums were considered a perfectly neutral part of a beautiful smile while I was growing up, a “gummy smile” is now considered a flaw that can be fixed with something called a “lip flip,” where a little bit of Botox is injected into the top lip so that you can’t see the gums as much when you smile. 

My own personal indignation about gummy smiles aside, I think it’s important to explore how we got here—to a world in which the very traits and features that people once found the most beautiful are being re-categorized as defects worth correcting—and understand how it’s changing our brains. 

To understand our cultural obsession with “fitting in,” we have to acknowledge that evolutionary biology has made it so that our sense of social belonging is inextricably linked to survival in our brains, and the vast majority of human traits (think: height, skin color, eye color, and nose size) exist on a bell curve.

There is so much normal, healthy genetic human diversity out there when it comes to the way we look. But people with traits that sit too far outside the middle of the bell curve might experience a feeling of outsider-ship that feels threatening to their very survival, and for good reason!

We evolved to automatically categorize everyone as part of our “in-group” or part of our “out-group,” and our very survival has always depended on the strength and protection of our relationships, and our secure position in our in-group. 

Put another way, standing out too much has always been risky, and standing out in the wrong ways could literally pose a threat to our survival.

Back in the day, a person born with highly visible natural genetic variations like albinism or vitiligo might have been understood as something like witchcraft or demonic possession, for example, causing people who looked different in those ways to be abandoned, ostracized, marginalized, or just straight up killed.  

These kinds of genetic differences are perfectly normal and healthy, but since they’re located on the flat edges of the genetic bell curve they’re uncommon. Unusual visible differences tend to attract attention, and far more often than not that attention is negative. 

People who are perceived to look “too different” have historically often been the targets of fear, suspicion, anger, and violence, so it makes perfect sense that standing out too much feels dangerous or stressful to us on an unconscious level. 

This survival mechanism is so powerful that it sometimes attaches itself inappropriately to visual differences that are subtle or non-threatening. 

Anyone who has ever been a middle-schooler can attest to the fact that standing out too much from whatever is considered “normal” in your peer group can feel uncomfortable or scary, after all. We need to belong in order to survive, and belonging often requires a certain amount of “fitting in” with our in-group, so that they will recognize us as “one of them,” and offer us their acceptance and protection.  

All of this is to say that—while it’s inherently unjust that people are treated differently based on how they look—it makes perfect sense from an evolutionary psychology perspective that people have learned to feel stressed or insecure about aspects of their appearance that are very rare, and to want to change them. 

Nose jobs have been around forever, for example, and growing up I understood nose jobs to be a totally reasonable solution to the “problem” of having a distractingly gigantic or curvy nose. Unaware of the racist and antisemitic roots of this trend, I found this explanation for why people got noses fairly intuitive as a child:

“There was something really different and notable about their face that made them stand out and feel insecure and anxious… so they fixed it.”

This perspective—which I now understand to be problematic and oppressive in its own right—pretty much summed up how most of the more extreme forms of “beauty labor” like plastic surgery were talked about when I was growing up. 

The general idea was that people only took these kinds of drastic measures if there was something really different or “ugly” about the way they looked. In order to be acceptable, the seriousness of the solution was meant to match the seriousness of the “problem,” and the (admittedly oppressive) rules for what counted as a “problem” were widely agreed upon. 

So, yes, people have always wanted to move their appearance from the flat outer edges of the bell curve to the safe and comfortable middle part. 

But for people who were already squarely inside the middle of the bell curve, unique features and traits have always been accepted—and in some cases even celebrated!—until very recently. 

Think about how someone with prominent birth marks or “port-wine stains” on their face might have been historically ostracized by polite society, while Marilyn Monroe and Cindy Crawford were both celebrated for their signature “beauty marks.” 

Why is that? What’s the difference?

The truth is that it was never the mere presence of a unique trait that determined whether it would be considered ugly or beautiful, but rather the full context within which that trait existed. This context would include:

1. How conventionally attractive she is outside of this feature.

2. Her other levels of social status and privilege.

3. The unique trait’s placement on the bell curve. 

A woman who was wealthy, high-status, and otherwise conventionally beautiful would always be able to “get away” with more of a visible facial difference, for example, without it being seen to negatively impact her beauty. 

In fact, slight facial differences have often been thought of as something that enhances someone’s beauty, as long as she checks enough other boxes for conventional attractiveness, and the difference is fairly subtle. (Think about Lauren Hutton’s teeth gap, or Julianne Moore’s freckles!)

Unexpected features can read as fun and appealing on someone whose appearance is otherwise firmly within the bell curve, and the research actually shows that we tend to rate people with interesting and unique features as more attractive than faces that are more “average” or “normal!” (This is only true up until a point, however, and if a face deviates too far from what we consider “normal,” we do start to rate it as less attractive again.)

I think this research about the psychology of beauty is important to understand, because in the last decade or so our society has been seeing the emergence of a new and disturbing pattern:

Many women who are already squarely inside the middle of the “beauty bell curve” are now erasing or altering their unique facial features, in an effort to move themselves to the dead center. 

Every single one of the features that make our faces unique—the traits that make a person look like themself—have gradually (but effectively) been re-branded as flaws that can be fixed or corrected in service of what injectors, estheticians, and plastic surgeons now call “facial balance, symmetry, and harmony.”

But what is “facial balancing and symmetry,” if not the erasure of unique features? What is the goal of modern beauty interventions, if not to move every single feature closer to the center line of the bell curve?

The homogenously perfect-but-unremarkable look (sometimes called “Instagram face”) has become the goal, and it’s redefining our idea of beauty in a way that feels deeply anti-human. 

Beauty is now defined by “perfection.”

Everything perfectly symmetrical. Every ratio re-balanced and every angle re-calibrated. Nothing standing out. Everything flawless; everyone the same. 

To explain what I mean by this being “anti-human,” I want you to think back to the research on attractiveness, and how we tend to find beauty in the unexpected details. Now think about the other places where we revel in the joy of visual beauty: art, design, and nature.

Visual art and design exist entirely to be experienced by looking at it, so if ever there was a place for “perfect prettiness” to reign supreme, it would be there, right? But if we consider the most famous works of art throughout history, we will find very few (if any!) examples of art that was perfectly polished, symmetrical, or “balanced.”

Great art is interesting. It’s compelling. It may or may not be “pretty,” but it always makes you feel something when you look at it. 

And the thing that makes something like a painting or photograph great is the exact same thing we just unpacked about people’s faces— it’s about placing something unexpected within a framework for the viewer that feels familiar enough to connect with.

It’s the way the subject is set just off from center. The way the light creates uneven shadows and highlights. The capturing of randomized texture. The visible paint strokes. The negative space.

We sometimes describe these features as “imperfections,” both because we recognize that art is only art if it’s not a perfect replication of reality, and because we recognize that great art has to tell a story. 

Even if we’re not consciously aware of the story being told, art is beautiful to us because it moves us… and in order to be moved, something has to challenge or upturn our sense of normalcy. Something unexpected has to happen; something interesting or new has to be suggested. 

We want to keep looking at great art because there is a communication happening between us and the art—the art takes us on a journey, and we call it beautiful if we find value in that journey.

There is something called the “rule of threes” in interior design, which says that a space will feel sterile and uncomfortable to our brains if it appears too symmetrical and perfect. Designers will always place three books on the coffee table instead of two or four, because our brains dislike it when the world around us feels too even or curated. 

This is also why people who care about fashion will tuck in their shirts to look a little messy and asymmetrical, and include a mixture of colors and textures to their outfits. Our brains are happiest when things aren’t perfectly “balanced and symmetrical,” and we consider these slightly imperfect and undone details to be the most visually appealing and beautiful. 

It’s the same with nature, too! 

A sunset that was too perfectly symmetrical, balanced, and proportional would not only read to you as less beautiful, but it would also make you feel anxious and alarmed, because like… what the hell is going on here?? 

At best, overly “perfected” imagery robs us of joy and humanity, and at worst, it makes us feel scared and unsafe.

And yet, when it comes to faces, we are rapidly moving in the direction of “uncanny valley” being our day to day normal.

By striving for perfect “facial balance and symmetry,” we are not only losing the very thing that our brains find most attractive and appealing, but we are losing an important part of our humanity as well. 

If there are “two wolves inside us” as the phrase goes, then we’ve been feeding the wolf who wants to feel like they belong, while starving the wolf who can feel moved by a painting, or a sunset. (And I can only imagine what this change is doing to our brains and nervous systems.)

While I can certainly understand how each individual person arrives at the decision to change their features to conform more closely to the “ideal,” I think a lot about the societal impact of narrowing the bell curve this much. 

Hit reply to share your thoughts!

Big hug,

Jessi

PS Wanna work together? I have new coaching spots opening up this month—apply for coaching here to chat!