We have become very good at making people look beautiful. We understand the visual signals of youth, symmetry and attractiveness, and we have more tools than ever to reproduce them.
But the more interesting contemplation is whether these signals are actually what make someone beautiful.
Spend enough time around people and the distinction becomes obvious. A face can be almost perfectly proportioned and leave very little impression. Another can have an unusual nose, uneven features, or some quality that would never make it onto a cosmetic checklist, and yet you find yourself wanting to look at them.
Usually, what draws us in is the person animating the face: their smile, eye contact, expressions, energy, and particularity. We don’t experience a face as a static arrangement of features.
This is why someone can become more beautiful the longer we know them. Like art, their face hasn’t necessarily changed. Our understanding of it has.
Cosmetics can change the surface. They can make someone look younger, fresher, more polished, or more conventionally attractive. But they cannot give a face true warmth, character, individuality or aliveness.
And perhaps this is where our current beauty culture gets confused. We have become so skilled at reproducing the optics of beauty that we sometimes mistake the optics for the thing itself.
The danger is believing that every deviation from an aesthetic ideal is a defect, or that perfecting the individual parts will necessarily make the whole more beautiful.
Sometimes the feature we want to correct is the feature that makes a face memorable. It is a face that feels inhabited that radiates pure beauty.
The surface matters. But the surface is only interesting when there is something underneath it.
Substance > surface.