For hundreds of years, our ideas of beauty have been based on Eurocentric ideals, and this includes modern-day ideas of “perfection” in terms of physical attributes. A major part of this is symmetry, which has been touted as one of the chief “must haves” for someone to be considered “beautiful” per social standards. And those who do not have symmetrical features are often treated as oddities. It doesn’t take a genius to see why this is problematic.
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It all started with Leonardo Da Vinci’s “golden ratio”
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Italian mathematician and painter Leonardo Da Vinci combined the principles of science, maths, and painting to create his theory of the ideal human form, and penned a book called De Divina Proportione about it.
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This view of anatomy, called the ‘Golden Ratio’, was heavily influenced by concepts of symmetry, as it denoted just how much space there would be between each feature for a true-to-life representation of a human figure in visual art. What this means, in lay people terms, is that in the “perfect” face or body, the eyes have to be a certain size vis a vis the jaw, and the nose and lips have to have a certain distance from each other in order to be considered beautiful, or ideal. This was meant to help create paintings of the human body that are “aesthetically pleasing.”
Today, years later, these ideas remain, but are applied to actual humans, instead of paintings. As a result, we think of smaller eyes, different eyebrows, uneven breasts and asymmetrical eyes as abnormalities, even going so far as to mock people who have them.
Facial or body symmetry is quite uncommon, and nothing to feel ashamed about
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Oscar-winning Hollywood actress Jennifer Lawrence famously talked about how she was shocked to find out that her breasts are uneven. But, the fact is, this is true for most women. Still, plastic surgery for “adjusting” this is not unheard of.
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In Hindi, slurs exist for people with differently-sized eyes. Why are we considered deviants for having a feature that is different from what people think is normal?
The fact is, asymmetry is not the anomaly it is made out to be. Most people’s left eye is different from the right. Most people don’t have matching eyebrows. Most people have a nose which is not perfectly straight with identical nostrils. Absolute physical symmetry, even in people society considers the epitome of physical beauty, is rare.
Normalising asymmetry is important
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At the end of the day, the goal here is two-fold. First, we need to realise that it’s not necessary to be symmetrical in order to be considered beautiful. Someone with asymmetrical features can look quite charming, and the lack of mirror-image symmetry adds a lot of character to a face too. Second, we need to understand that we don’t need to be beautiful as per social standards in order to be worthy of love or respect. We are more than what we look like.
That’s why this fixation with physicalities needs to go. This obsession with symmetry fuels dissatisfaction with one’s physical appearance, causing people to be shamed and ashamed, and we need to talk about it more so that no one feels ‘lesser than’.
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We cannot keep undervaluing ourselves or feeling lesser than because we aren’t the spitting image of physical perfection as per social standards. At some point, we need to reach a degree of body neutrality where it doesn’t matter what we look like anymore. As if there wasn’t enough stuff to worry about, we don’t need to spend hours padding our bras, perfecting our eyebrows, and drawing on matching eyeliner—it really doesn’t matter!
Lead image credit: T-Series, Yash Raj Films
