A recent study shows that ideal beauty can be a matter of millimeters when it comes to facial symmetry and features. While the importance of facial symmetry has been known for some time, a team at the University of California, San Diego, claims that they’ve discovered the ideal alignment for female facial features. What the world considers attractive has in fact been boiled down to scientific measurements.
Now what are you supposed to do with that data? Run to the mirror and see how well your face aligns? No one’s face is perfectly symmetric. Unfortunate, I know. So what’s a girl to do? Plastic surgery? Something even more drastic?
Researchers from the study go on to say that women need not fret. A good haircut or some makeup can sole most issues a woman may find herself dealing with when it comes to an asymmetrical face. But is that the message we should be sending to the women, teens and girls of our spanning generations?
It’s a message of realism, science and idealism. Where the happy medium lies depends on our society’s ability to determine what ideal beauty really is, and that’s something we’ve been struggling with for centuries. Puting such a scientific twist on things could really push the issue into a new realm, and determining where we go from here can affect women and the topic of one’s self-image for centuries to come.
So based on science, how do we determine the direction of this impending issue? How can science help us to strive towards that happy medium, where idealism and realism meet? For starters, the research teams behind a particular study on something as objective as ideal beauty should avoid making statements, suggestions and recommendations based on their data. Just state the facts.
Part of social evolution is a population’s ability to discuss these matters based on the information at hand. Certainly he realistic side of things will play out. Even as we strive for the perfection of our ideals, we’re stuck dealing with the reality of our every day lives. We tend to modify the effects of our every day lives by doing things like changing our haircuts and make up schemes to better fit the current standards of the day.
Something like ideal beauty can really become an issue on a personal level when changing one’s physical appearance becomes a primary goal for an individual. And there are several reasons why one would do so. Perhaps they were born with a deformity, or perhaps they want to see better results in their professional development. This is where realism meets idealism, and the need for ongoing scientific studies prevails.
It’s up to all of us to determine the importance of any given scientific study, and as individuals within a given society we’re all responsible for the messages that are passed down from generation to generation. Finding a way to utlize both aspects of our social evolution is the tricky part, but that too is rather subjective and left to the whiles of each and every one of us. What’s your ideal beauty and why would you want to be ideally beautiful?