What’s in a Face?
thoughts on beauty & some armchair philosophy.
1.
My earliest memory of a camera is me running away from it, morbidly terrified because I couldn’t differentiate a camera from an injection. To be exact, I couldn’t differentiate the intentions of the cameraman from that of the injection-loving pharmacist my mum took me to whenever I complained of a stomach ache.
Many years after I learned the difference, I continued to run from cameras. I still do, much to the displeasure of friends who have tried and still sometimes try to take pictures with me.
When people ask why I avoid being photographed, I say nothing or skirt around the question. I tell them stories like this. My childhood is littered with them. I was tricked into taking my first baby picture. The story, according to my mum, is that I cried every time the photographer tried to take the picture. My mum had to put a feeding bottle in my mouth and yank it out just before the camera clicked.
You can see formula spilling from my lips in my first-ever picture.
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I am not the biggest fan of how I look in pictures. This explains why I do not keep them. More than just how I look in pictures, I do not sit well with my face, for its ambiguity—something easily settled by an out-of-body experience.
Like some people, I cannot reconcile the image in the mirror with the one in the camera. The images in the mirror are more pleasant, sometimes, maybe because what we see in the mirror is fleeting, constantly shifting. It is easier to over-analyse an image, to deconstruct it from various angles, when it is still.
I’ve always wanted to believe and say that I’m simply not photogenic. But I’ve also always thought there was something pretentious, egoistic about proclaiming the camera a liar. I’ve never seen my face. So why should I believe the mirror any more than the camera? Why should I cherry-pick which mirrors to believe? A camera produces a reflection of the material it’s fed. And while I do not always recognise the varying images of me it produces, other people look into cameras and get results that match their real-life faces. This makes me inclined to believe the camera.
2.
Navigating human relationships when you don’t like how you look requires deftness and a little dishonesty.
You cannot, in the spirit of being honest, explain to everyone that the real reason you get weird—retreating like a wounded cat—and won’t take pictures is that you know you won’t like how you look in them. So you lie, for example, that you prefer being mysterious. Or that you just do not like cameras pointed at you, which is not really a lie because it has grown to be the truth about you.
When you express any serious insecurity about how you look, people meet your revelation with pity, hostility, or patronising surprise, as though you have just admitted to having a rare disease or personal failing that should embarrass you. Their eyes ask if their mouths don’t: Why don’t you love yourself?
Being insecure about your appearance is considered a superficial preoccupation or a symptom of low self-esteem, markers no well-thinking person wants. So people often admonish you to focus on other nonphysical qualities you can take pride in, like your skills, ideas, magnanimous personality, intelligence, and achievements—concerns considered far less superficial. These admonitions assume that taking pride in your nonphysical qualities and being insecure about your appearance are mutually exclusive affairs.
They are not.
Your face is as much a part of you as your personality, achievements, skills, and brilliant ideas. If you cannot comfortably occupy the vessel that brings forth all your bright ideas and makes their execution possible, there should be no shame in being honest about it. Your looks are ephemeral; that is true. But so are your wit and intelligence.
Although we tend to regard concerns about appearance as shallow, our lives are influenced by our proximity to what is considered beautiful. This is especially true when we stray too far or are located quite close to the ideal. This proximity influences how others perceive us before we speak, the spaces we’re allowed to occupy, how our actions are interpreted, and how much grace we get.
Before other things come into play, our proximity to the ideal determines our proximity to desirability—or the absence of it.
Beauty is the cover by which we judge the book before reading or casting it aside. Sometimes, it is also the font: something that’s hard to ignore while reading the book, even if you like the story.
When you discuss insecurities about your appearance, people who are trying to be kind reassure you that you’re beautiful, even if you objectively are not. They tell you to love yourself, that beauty is on the inside or in the eyes of the beholder, that you, too, are ravishing. You simply have to believe it.
If such platitudes about the inherent malleability of beauty were true, it seems unlikely that we would be trying so hard to redefine what is considered beautiful today.
External perception matters. That’s why we try so hard to shape it.
3.
Discussions about beauty can get complicated. This complication arises because beauty is judged based on desirability and attractiveness, the prerequisites of which always shift with person. Though this shifting quality makes it easy to define beauty as purely subjective, beauty appears to also have an objective component.
Regardless of our subjective definitions of beauty, some faces command more objective or universal appeal than others. This objective appeal or beauty is tied to the architectural finishing of our faces more than we like to admit. This may explain why even babies, who have not been initiated into our subjective socio-cultural ideals about beauty, show preferences1 for certain face types with features that make up what is contentiously referred to as objective beauty.
Beauty is often relegated to an abstraction imposed on the body, but beauty is often about the body. Attractiveness, which we often use interchangeably with beauty, is not always about the body.
When I speak about beauty here, I think of it as (the potential for) objective appeal and attractiveness as subjective appeal. You often find both in one place, but not always. You can appreciate beauty without being pulled towards it; the same way you can find something attractive knowing it isn’t necessarily beautiful.
What people collectively consider beautiful often tends toward an ideal; what we individually find attractive is subjective, dependent sometimes on simple quirks like the curving of one’s eyebrows and our idiosyncratic fondness for that type of curving. Sometimes, the appeal of one’s face is accentuated by how we feel about that person.
Attractiveness is in the eyes of the beholder; beauty is not. We impose beauty on what we're attracted to. Such beauty, however real to the imposer, does not always have external validity. Daily encounters with the outside world and failures to command the kind of desirability that comes with being objectively beautiful will reveal this incongruence where it exists. This is why platitudes about inner beauty, though they may help with self-acceptance, are limiting in how much they can assuage the insecurity that stems from the gulf between how one looks and the many ways one could look to be desirable.
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There are many reasons people are averse to the idea that objective beauty exists. Some genuinely believe beauty is wholly a social construct. Others contend that the very idea that some people are (more) beautiful and others are not (as beautiful) is exclusionary.
I’m inclined to believe in the existence of objective beauty because it is true that there is objective hideousness. If we can agree (whether we’re comfortable admitting it or not) that some faces, though rare, are objectively upsetting to look at (i.e., more likely to generate widespread agreement about their unattractiveness than most people), then there must be faces that are objectively pleasant to behold (i.e., whose appeal is often a consensus reality) on the opposite end of the spectrum. Like ugliness, only the extremes of beauty are easy to distinguish. Most faces exist somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between both extremes, but the fact that both concepts exist in our minds points to objective ideals about beauty or ugliness which we collectively hold, even if we cannot tell what the composition of these ideals are.
The existence of an objective component to beauty is only useful as an abstract reference; it does not decomplicate beauty.
A fundamental problem with the idea of objective beauty is that it is hard to tell the difference between what is objectively beautiful and what is simply conventionally beautiful (i.e. considered objectively beautiful because of the leanings of one’s socio-cultural environment); the lines frequently blur because of how often both concepts overlap.
Given this complication, many conclude that the influence of our socio-cultural programming on our perception of beauty is evidence that beauty is wholly socially constructed. I think what is more true is that there is more than one way to be objectively beautiful. The problem is not saying that objective beauty exists but insisting that it has a singular definition (e.g., a pointed nose, full lips, light skin, high cheekbones, or whatever convention pervades the socio-cultural setting within which one exists) even though the nebulous nature of objective beauty betrays a singular interpretation.
It is true that objective beauty does not look only one way. It is also true that not everyone is objectively beautiful. The idea of beauty is by itself exclusionary: in its crudest interpretation, it is a measure of the distance between a person and hideousness, and not everyone is at the same distance; otherwise, the concept loses meaning. This is why I disagree with people whose definition of facial beauty as an observable fact is necessarily all-inclusive. Can people of diverse body types and races be objectively beautiful? Yes. Is everyone beautiful? No, although I agree that everyone may be attractive to some subsets of people.
Declaring that everyone is beautiful seems like a good recourse when someone expresses insecurity about their appearance. But it can do more harm to people who see through the meaninglessness of this platitude because they are daily witnesses to their failure to attract the rewards attendant of beauty, conventional or objective.
It can be made unacceptable to say that some people are more beautiful than others, but it will not erase the gravitation people have towards beautiful faces, and the people not gravitated towards cannot be made blind to this discrepancy.
4.
What is considered conventionally beautiful today is often criticised for emerging from Western ideals about beauty. This may be true. But the prevailing ideas about conventional beauty are not necessarily the same as objective beauty, only one of its many iterations. Even so, it doesn’t matter much in the day-to-day lives of people who live within this context. What matters is that there is an ideal, and most people’s eyes have been trained to adore that ideal. Regardless of how one feels about it, and how many true criticisms of conventional beauty standards one is privy to, one’s appearance will be filtered and judged through those lenses. And the consequences of falling (or feeling like you have fallen) too far from such ideals on your chances, self-perception, and behaviour are real.
People are, among other things, the sounding boards that validate our existence. If you tell yourself every morning that you are beautiful but the external world disagrees, it is difficult to build a concrete belief in such declarations. Whatever beauty one believes themself to have in such contexts will easily feel like a fake, a sorry imitation without validity outside their head.
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Personally, I began to understand the nuances that defined what was conventionally good looking and not when I was around five or six. I was playing with a heap of construction sand outside my house when my neighbour, a young man I had just greeted, looked over his shoulders at me when he was a few strides from his gate and said, ‘Flat nose.’
I looked up, completely unaware at the time that it was intended to be an insult. So I simply responded that his was pointed.
I only understood that my reaction was supposed to be shame a couple of days after this, when he continued to call me that and I began to observe the noses of other people and realised that my nose fell short of the pointy standard required for conventional beauty.
In junior school, my seatmates made jokes about how my nose was the biological representation of the back of those old tortoise cars. Creative. They understood that it was a trigger. And because I now understood how it was meant to make me feel, it made all the bones in my body thaw and stream out my eyes. I would place my head, cushioned between my arms, on my table and sob, their laughter tickling the air. My sisters had fairly pointed noses with well-defined bridges; my father, too. When my mother told me she could not massage my nose into shape during those first few days of tenderness, as she had done for my sisters, because I was a caesarean-section child and the matron in the ward I was born wouldn’t let anyone else come in and do it, I spent many sorrowful nights, whenever someone made fun of my face, sniffing in tears and muttering curses at the matron, the witch responsible for ruining my life. I wasn’t nine yet when I began to ask my father about cosmetic surgery, about what parts of my body could be cut and used to give form and structure to the bridge of my nose. At some point, this was my biggest goal: to, one day, give myself the right nose shape when I had enough money to.
I no longer nurse this dream, but not because I have achieved an inspiring level of radical self-love. I have not. I simply am no longer willing to change anything except by means of a magic wand.
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What has always disconcerted me about our relationship with beauty is not whether or not one possesses it or to what extent one’s possession of it can be considered objective: it is the imposition of a penalty for not meeting the prevailing ideals.
It is normal to make internal judgments about the beauty of others. But we can only know that we do not consider a person beautiful; it is not as easy to know whether they are objectively so or not. Even if our perception of their appearance were truly universal, it is not anyone’s duty to announce these judgments unprovoked.
When a person isn’t beautiful, they know. They are slapped left and right by the social consequences of this fact every day, and the consequences are harsh enough. There is no need to go out of one’s way to point it out, but there is also no need to lie.
I’ve never felt comfortable laughing at people’s looks because I understand what it is like to be laughed at in this context, even in harmless jest. But I’ve also never felt comfortable saying a person was beautiful if I didn’t believe they were. One reason is the guilt I feel about lying. Another is that I’ve never felt comfortable being told I looked like a Greek god when there was overwhelming evidence I did not.
I am aware some people thrive on such praise, and perhaps it helps their ego. That’s not what it does for me, and sometimes I think of it as a type of cruelty, being lied to. As a child, the compliments I received about my face were either underhanded and overtly so—the kinds you were made fun of for accepting, for daring to believe true—or so obviously delivered as participation trophies in an attempt to provide an ego boost.
While I recognise that my relationship with compliments is informed by my own experiences and is by no means universal, I believe compliments are best when they are a sincere reflection of a person’s perception of you, not sympathetic gestures replete with obvious exaggerations.
There is something inauthentic about pretending that what isn’t widely palatable is palatable to everyone. This knowledge is often what makes people feel bad about themselves even when society bends over backwards to declare them and everyone else ravishing sights.
5.
Our go-to, well-meaning responses to people’s insecurities about their appearance often involve trivialising such concerns or insisting on the irrefutable beauty of everyone. I’m not sure why we do that, but I suspect we’re afraid that if we stopped trying to declare everyone beautiful and simply accepted that some people are not, we would descend into a world like the post-truth society in Adjei-Brenyah’s The Era2 where everyone is cruel in the name of being honest. It’s a valid concern, but I don’t think it’s entirely true. I think that accepting that not everyone is beautiful can be more empowering than pretending everyone is or trying to convince people—when the evidence suggests otherwise—that they are ravishing.
It is perfectly human to mourn the gulf between how you look and how you wish you looked. Beauty is attended by many privileges and beneficial assumptions, so it is natural that one feels the periodic bouts of sadness or insecurity that stems from missing out on those benefits. This is a human reaction, not a personal failing or personality defect that must be corrected.
Is it possible to lessen the severity of such insecurities? Yes. But I do not believe we do it by attempting to recast everyone as beautiful. Doing that gaslights people into believing their concerns are unreasonable, particularly when the outside world does not corroborate the mantras and platitudes by which they are told to live.
Shushing, deflecting, or imposing beauty on people when they express insecurities about their appearance or make dry observations about their lack of beauty that aren’t untrue reinforces the idea that it is not okay to not be beautiful.
Forcing a definition of beauty that necessarily includes every single person plays into the assumption that it is not enough to simply be: that to be, you must be beautiful. It also suggests the absence of a centre. It suggests that not being beautiful translates into hideousness, which is untrue because most people occupy different places along the middle of a wide spectrum. Even when people stray further from the ideal than others, kindness seems more important than lies. People do not have to be reimagined as beautiful to be worthy of space.
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People scarcely let you express your insecurities about your appearance as dry fact. If you are indeed lacking in beauty, they feel it is upon them to comfort you with lies or ask you to dwell on greater concerns. If you are mistaken about your lack of beauty, they try to help with your self-confidence or accuse you of trying to mine external validation for your ego.
People seem not to understand that half the problem with feeling insecure about how you look is that it doesn’t matter too much how you look. Sometimes people who look good feel insecure about how they look. But these feelings don’t spring out of nowhere, and they don’t fester without some degree of external corroboration at some point in their lives. Even when the dog days are over, the practical limitations to observing oneself as others do make it hard to fully shake off insecurities that have had years to fester.
The reception I’ve always wished existed is one that allows people to express their insecurities about their appearance with some dryness, without subjection to armchair psychoanalysis or therapizing, without being treated like incomplete individuals. People should be able to discuss their relationship with their perception of their own beauty without derision, pity, or bombardment with meaningless platitudes. People feel insecure about their appearance; and while that is sad, it’s a fact no more pitiful than feeling insecure about one’s intelligence.
Footnotes & Asides
This study by by Jack Griffey & Anthony Little on infant's visual preferences for facial traits associated with adult attractiveness is part of a wider body of literature on the subject.