A few weeks ago I went to a screening of a documentary about cosmetic surgery. One of the people they interviewed was a plastic surgeon, Mr. Marquardt. He’s produced a mask that he believes represents the “ideal” human face, based on various permutations of the “golden ratio” (1:1.618). He claims that this mask fits anyone from any race in any time and place who is or was considered to be exceptionally beautiful. His theory is basically that human beings recognize each other visually, using a hard-wired blueprint of what a human face is “supposed” to look like. The closer someone conforms to this blueprint, the more “humaness” our brain automatically ascribes to them. (Evidence for this includes the fact that even infants respond positively to pretty faces and negatively to ugly ones.)
I find this theory fascinating and horrifying in equal measure. In subsequent group discussions of the film, most people just seemed to find it horrifying. There was much animated condemnation of Mr. Marquardt for promoting this monolithic, reductionist, conformist view of beauty, rather than recognizing that beauty comes from within, that there’s something beautiful about everyone, that beauty is truth and truth beauty, etc., etc. I found this reflexive rebuttal overly facile. What really scares me isn’t the idea that Mr. Marquardt is promoting this monolithic, reductionist, conformist view of beauty and that he’s an idiot, but that he’s promoting this monolithic, reductionist, conformist view of beauty and that maybe he’s right. (In the film, Mr. Marquardt comes across as extremely obnoxious, so it’s hard to say how much of the negative reaction was colored by people’s response to his personality.)
Speaking of beauty, I thought this video was pretty striking. It reminds me of a study I just read, which found that people are so deluged by images of artificially attractive faces that no one in this particular survey rated any of the 150 actual, existing, makeup-less faces any higher than “average.” Only computer-manipulated faces received rankings of “rather attractive” or “very attractive.”
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