The Lies We Are Told About Beauty — Featurism And Myths About Symmetry

Everywhere we turn and mostly every thing we see has been molded by the oppressive hands of those who believe symmetry is king. We are conditioned to believe that anything symmetrical is beautiful and anything asymmetrical is to be dismissed as ugly, unattractive, repulsive, unhealthy, even.

Things must be unrealistically proportionate and in a very specific way—to the taste and whims of those in power, as it is usually the case. This is so insidious that we’ve created entire worlds around it: in the arts, in cinema, in architecture, with the people we befriend, date, and choose to have children with.

Take so called European Standards of beauty, for instance. We are taught, from an early age, to believe that, first, white Europeans have a monopoly on certain phenotypes that are considered the most beautiful—dismissing the fact that race has absolutely zero to do with biology or phenotypes. You simply cannot attribute any to any race, as much as popular discourse and the media would like us to believe.

“European traits” are found in Black and Brown faces, in large numbers, everywhere, including Asia and Africa. Asian and African traits, if there is such a thing (but let’s humor this nonsensical and inconsistent thing for educational purposes), are found in European faces, in large numbers, everywhere. See how that sounds once we flip it and reverse it? We must stop centering whiteness and Europe, defaulting to them every chance we get to speak about ourselves. It’s futile. It never ends well because not even most Europeans fall under Europeans standards of beauty. It’s a very sinister and convincing myth. It’s an outright lie. Many of us know this.

When you Google “the most beautiful people in the world”, you will be bombarded with pictures of so called symmetrical faces and body types according to a bizarre “golden ratio” we’re haplessly applying to human beings. There’s even a Golden Mask, the Marquardt Beauty Mask, named after surgeon Stephen R Marquardt, to “measure” and “quantify” how beautiful we are.

It’s giving phrenology and scientific racism, because, guess who it applies to the most?

So now we’re all walking around incredibly self-conscious about the way we look. Do you remember your parents standing in front of a mirror, pulling some part of their body to look a certain way, shaping it into what would make them look “perfect”, what they assumed society deemed beautiful? Do you do this? If only you had the money for that surgery just to give you that little edge in the world, with that gig, with a potential… Thanks a lot, Stephen. A million mal de ojos for you.

Even our more conscious youth has fallen victim to it. You might have seen a gross TikTok filter inspired by this golden ratio. Actually, there are a few filters that have gone viral because of it.

There are even some for your eyebrows!

This golden ratio epidemic has USians going under the knife to the tune of 17 billion dollars. As you know, that is expected to grow exponentially as the years come. The worldwide market worth of cosmetic surgery is projected to grow to 145 billion dollars by 2030. That’s also not counting the fajas, the makeup, the clothing and devices we buy to look “presentable” and “beautiful”—for ourselves, di’que, supuestamente. We are very adept at gaslighting others, but especially ourselves.

You can deduce what featurism is from what I’ve stated, if you don’t already know what it means. You can find more about it here, here, here, here… I suggest you do your own research about it—and go into depth since there aren’t many “mainstream” sources about it.

As you know, featurism is usually weaponized against Black and Brown people, Black and Brown women, Black and Brown children… It’s also accompanied by colorism and texturism. A dark triad of ugliness.

Let’s not forget the body-shaming through fatphobia, racism, sexism… that also uphold it. Even the bodies of most known plus-size models are expected to look “proportionate” according to the standards of the deeply problematic fashion industry. Their faces? They don’t stray too far from those so called European standards of beauty.

Attractiveness and attraction have also little to do with symmetry. You don’t need me to pull out studies for you to know that you’ve been deeply attracted to people who aren’t deemed “conventionally attractive.”

Symmetry ins’t necessarily ugly either, but it is by no means supreme. No matter how much the powers that be want us to believe. There’s beauty in so called imperfection: in the arts, in cinema, in architecture, with the people we befriend, date, and choose to have children with.

You are beautiful to me.

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César Vargas is an award-winning writer, advocate, strategist, speaker, and social critic with a loyal following and a robust social capital that spans from coast to coast: Editors, journalists, celebrities, activists, artists, executives, politicians, and multiple communities. He was named one of 40 Under 40: Latinos in American Politics by the Huffington Post. He’s written about internal and external community affairs to several news outlets and quoted in others: The Huffington Post, NBC, Fox News, Voxxi, Okayafrica, Okayplayer, Sky News, Salon, The Guardian, Latino Magazine, Vibe, The Hill, BET, and his own online magazine—which has a fan base of over 25,000 people and has reached over a million—UPLIFTT. He’s familiar with having a voice that informs, invigorates, and inspires people—creating content that usually goes viral. He recently won two awards from Fusion and the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts for his films Some Kind of Spanish and Black Latina Unapologetically. He attained a degree in Films Studies from Queens College, CUNY. He is currently raising and distributing funds for Haitians in Sosúa.