My left eyebrow is generally greater than my proper eyebrow. The distinction is especially pronounced after I increase them — it provides me a skeptical expression. And this wasn’t one thing I spotted that I appreciated about myself till it was gone. I couldn’t entry that look anymore. After I raised my eyebrows, the circumflex was the identical on each side.
Technically talking, this symmetry made me extra enticing. In her 2019 tour de drive about “Instagram Face,” Jia Tolentino, in The New Yorker, requested plastic surgeons in regards to the “single, cyborgian” visage that appeared to dominate Hollywood and on-line influencer land. “It’s a younger face, in fact, with poreless pores and skin and plump, excessive cheekbones. It has catlike eyes and lengthy, cartoonish lashes; it has a small, neat nostril and full, lush lips,” Tolentino defined. One plastic surgeon, Jason Diamond, informed her that whereas no single look would work for everybody, “there are constants,” including: “Symmetry, proportion, concord. We’re all the time attempting to create steadiness within the face.”
However what if the imbalance, that asymmetry, is the place the curiosity — even the humanity — is?
My jacked up eyebrows used to hassle me. Somebody as soon as informed me I appeared like Dora Maar, the surrealist photographer and Pablo Picasso muse. On the time, I took it as an insult as a result of I couldn’t inform if the reference was to the girl herself, or her 1937 portrait, during which her eyes are misaligned and searching in numerous instructions.
After my Botox expertise, although, I reconsidered the comparability, and considered it extra as a praise. My face won’t ever be normatively lovely, but it surely might mild a spark. I used to be shocked to search out myself glad when, after about six months, the injections light and my eyebrows went again to their outdated methods.
I fear that this hard-won perspective is beneath siege, as facial uniformity turns into ever extra dominant with the ubiquity of injections and closely filtered photographs on-line. In October, for The Reduce, Daisy Schofield wrote about youngsters who’re already centered on anti-aging skincare. “The wonder commonplace is to remain younger, and I do attempt to match the wonder commonplace,” one 15-year-old informed her. In 2021, for The Occasions, Jessica Schiffer wrote about 20- and 30-somethings getting “child Botox” to fight an “all-consuming anxiousness” about getting old.
