A slew of filters on social media allows users to evaluate their features, reigniting age-old obsessions with perfection and beauty.
Mirrors lie. They reverse things. That face you see in the bathroom every morning, in your makeup compact: That is “opposite you”And yet, for the past two years or so, this simple fact has riveted and sometimes deeply upset many people trying out the facial-symmetry filters on social media.
Scroll through the pages and pages of users trying these filters, and you’ll find a range of reactions: Some people laugh at what looks like a warped fun house reflection; others appear to feel real shock and despair at the unfamiliar face on their phone screen. What propels this craze in this moment? The strangeness of pandemic times may be partly responsible. In the past two years, we’ve had both way too much virtual “face time” and way too little normal time with people face to face.
Leslie Lizette Cartier, a 20-year-old student in Colorado, struck social media gold with her facial-symmetry TikTok, which has about 11 million views. Her choice for musical accompaniment? Quasimodo’s theme song from Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame.The song had been paired with the symmetry filters before and Cartier latched on to the trend. Its lyrics include: “You are deformed/And you are ugly/And these are the crimes for which the world shows little pity”.
That said, the current obsession with symmetry may emerge from something older and deeper than any of these triggers. The human fascination with symmetry is an ancient phenomenon, with vast cultural and biological implications, which helps explain the strong emotions being expressed on social media. And so, some of the social media obsession with symmetry may actually be surging up from an ancient imperative that once privileged symmetry .Some scientists who study beauty have long maintained this. In her 1999 book, Survival Of The Prettiest, Harvard psychology professor Nancy Etcoff argues that regardless of culture or ethnicity, all human beings love and are drawn to beauty.
“All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed,” 19th-century British thinker John Ruskin wrote in The Stones Of Venice. As Prof Etcoff acknowledged, “the oddity, the rarity, the uniqueness of a person can be extremely attractive”.
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