People Are More Captivated By Facial Symmetry Than Ever, But Is That A Good Thing?
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Loading... - Aidan Moran
- 14 Apr 2022
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Back in 2020, I wrote about "Zoom Dysmorphia," a pandemic-born concept where people started to become hypercritical of their appearance on-screen, even on a tiny, pixelated corner square. Now, in 2022, this affinity for digital beauty has not only grown but graduated into a captivation with facial symmetry.
If you're well-versed in the ebbs and flows of TikTok trends, you know exactly what I'm talking about. A quick search for #symmetricalface on the app garners 105 million views and an endless string of videos, in which users flip their faces back and forth with the app's "inverted" filter—more often than not, they're met with a strikingly different image...and a sense of panic.
I was all-too-familiar with these facial symmetry filters (and the anxiety they serve), but it wasn't until I read about them in writer and editor Haley Nahman's newsletter, Maybe Baby, that I reflected on our fascination with them as a collective beauty culture. I, like Nahman, was less than enamored by my own asymmetrical results. Great! Never doing that again, I vowed. Though that didn't stop me from scrolling through the chasm of clips, one panic-stricken user after the other. If only a few individuals truly "passed" the symmetry test, why are we so captivated by this standard?
It turns out, our fascination with perfect symmetry might be a little overrated, anyway. Below, experts weigh in on the latest TikTok trend to sweep the beauty space.
The captivation of facial symmetry.
It’s more than just mere fascination with the intricate variances on the face: For many, it has become a fixation, often manifesting into cosmetic procedures like Botox, fillers, and plastic surgery. "Comment your plastic surgeon's name below please," one user wrote after displaying her results. Of course, the reasons someone might undergo a cosmetic procedure are very nuanced, and we're not here to shame anyone for making that choice. But we also can't ignore the rapid rate at which these procedures are climbing—and without technology like TikTok's "inverted" filter, we might not have even noticed those deviations were even there.
"My practice has definitely seen an increase in inquiries for improving facial asymmetries," says holistic plastic surgeon Shirley Madhère, M.D., founder of Jet Set Beauty Rx. "Younger patients have been requesting injectable fillers for evening out structural facial contours (without surgery), while more mature patients are more willing to invest in more definitive improvements that surgery may bring." Both ventures are meant to alter your appearance, and both, Madhère predicts, are byproducts of our filtered reality.
"Filters used on various social media platforms allow the opportunity for us to see ourselves as we perceive ourselves or wish to be seen," she adds. "Unfortunately, however, these tools are often dimensionless." The reason we even have facial features to begin with is to communicate with others and relay emotion and information—when you peer into a screen, you don't have that social context, so it's easier to evaluate so-called flaws on a one-dimensional plane.
While TikTok filters are a big slice of the pie, other pandemic-inspired shifts have a stake as well. "I believe this is multifactorial, including the various inverted filters being used on TikTok and Instagram, Zoom meetings, and now with masks being removed after two years," says holistic plastic surgeon Anthony Youn, M.D. Again, "Zoom Dysmorphia" is very much real; a 2020 survey in the journal Facial Plastic Surgery & Aesthetic Medicine even found that 40% of respondents who had never tried cosmetic procedures before planned to pursue treatments based on their video conference appearance. In short: We're staring at our faces more than we ever have before, which gives us ample opportunities to scrutinize our features. Read More...
