“What are the trends that are going to cause irreversible damage in our generation that we are not aware of now? What is the equivalent of mothers’ thin eyebrows for us?” asked TikToker Olivia Marin in a video that has almost reached one million likes. “Fat lips and the ‘overlip’,” the content creator continued, “girls who have taken acid at some point will want to stop doing it, because we will stop thinking that fat lips are super cool; and the lip gives way, because it is skin, they are going to be super plump.”
Already in 1991, the American writer Naomi Wolf rightly pointed out that beauty was not something “immutable” and that, in fact, what the myth of beauty consists of is that it “tells a story: the quality called beauty.” It has a universal and objective existence”, when the trap lies precisely in the paradox that beauty ideals mutate at such a speed that achieving them becomes a chimera that is absolutely unattainable for women.
Currently, this persecution of beauty aimed at fruitlessness seems to concentrate in an especially virulent way in relation to a kind of cult of the perfect face. According to the Spanish Society of Aesthetic Medicine, of the 871,525 medical-aesthetic treatments that were carried out in Spain in 2021, 72% corresponded to facial treatments; 42% of them were interventions with Botox and 32% with hyaluronic acid. In terms of gender, 71.8% of those who received some type of aesthetic treatment were women, and in 39.2% of these cases it was a facial treatment, compared to 18.1% of men.
In the middle of 2024, on TikTok the hashtag
But does the perfect face exist? And if so, what traits would define it? Could today’s most perfect face become tomorrow’s most undesirable? To what extent do facial fashions exist almost in analogous terms to how clothing fashions do? First of all, we should distinguish what perfection is from what facial harmony is, another of the concepts in vogue in the field of social networks.
Emma Luisa Cahill Marrón, doctor in Art History and member of the Art, Power and Gender Research Group at the University of Murcia, that the harmony of a face has to do with proportionality, something mathematical and, in that sense, this “ Yes, it is a quantifiable measure, something that can be assessed objectively.” “Do we understand that a face with a greater proportion between its different elements is more perfect than another?” says the specialist, who recognizes that, traditionally, this is how facial perfection has been represented and considered.
But as plastic surgeon Javier de Benito emphasizes, the permanently mutable definition of the perfect face is closely linked to the sociocultural reality relative to the spirit of the times, which was traditionally reflected, above all, in images that came from the world of cinema. “Historically, in the case of men, we have gone from the slap of Glenn Ford to Rita Hayworth, from that man with a masculine and aggressive face to another with much softer, more boyish features, such as Leonardo Di Caprio or Matt Damon,” he exemplifies.
“For ten or fifteen years, the model sought tends to be androgynous,” he continues, “with thicker lips, a soft nose, slanted and almond-shaped eyes, we see faces with fewer angles, with cheekbones and chins. less marked… “Thus, according to Benito, we are currently in a moment of impasse, a bit along the lines of “what is happening with gender, that we are redefining it.” “Today we look for a lack of definition of the signs that mark genders, whether someone is a man or a woman, the signs that mark prototypes,” he contextualizes.
This phenomenon in which the beautiful intersects with the cultural, the social and even the political, and which still predominantly affects women, was already explained by Wolf in 1991 when analyzing how this myth of beauty acted on them. “The qualities that in certain periods are considered beautiful in women are simple symbols of feminine behavior that is considered desirable in that period: in reality, the myth of beauty always always dictates behavior, and not appearance,” he asserted. “Female aging is not beautiful because over time women acquire greater power,” explained Wolf. And here is probably the crux of the matter: how what has to do with achieving beauty has to do with almost everything except beauty itself.
Three decades later – just a few weeks ago – the artist Marina Lovece published another viral video on Instagram in which she denounced that now “all famous people have the same face; It is no longer a question of whether she is pretty or ugly, but rather it symbolizes status.” “If you don’t have Kim Kardashian’s face it means you are poor, which is even worse than being ugly, poor and old,” she stated.
The intersection between homogeneity, symmetry and the search for eternal youth, as Cahill Marrón explains, refers to yesteryear, to the pictorial representations of Flemish paintings of the 15th century. “These were the ideals identified as beautiful” and they remain valid as a “conducting thread” with the current moment, although today these ideals reflect “much more the globalized world in which we live.” “It is very likely that today the most determining factor when defining the perfection of a face is the influence of two industries: that of music worldwide and that of entertainment that is produced and exported from the United States,” notes Cahill. Brown.
“In recent years I believe that the Kardashian-Jenner sisters have been the women who have most influenced the establishment of the current beauty canon: the facial transformation of Kylie Jenner – the youngest of them – until her appearance converges with that of her Sister Kim Kardashian – the one with the greatest presence and influence on social networks – is the clearest example of this process of facial homogenization derived from the attempt to resemble those we call influencers today,” he elaborates.
It is not trivial, when analyzing the dimension that facial trends are acquiring, to understand that social networks constitute an unprecedented phenomenon, something on which all experts agree. “There has always been this tendency to fit into the standard, only now, with the networks, we cannot avoid seeing those images and, if you are looking at the same thing all the time, in the end it becomes engraved in your mind and you end up wanting to be like that, because it is what it has to be,” admits makeup artist Natalia Belda.
“There is a harmonization of the face understood as adaptation to that standard, to the filter face; But there are very beautiful people who do not have a very harmonious face and have a super special type of beauty, precisely because it is not within the standard,” he claims.
For his part, de Benito emphasizes when defining what a beautiful face is, the importance of the “empathy” that it transmits: “There are wonderful faces that don’t tell you anything, that don’t sell, and others that, with a look or a smile are much more captivating: if a face does not act, it bores you and you forget it.” For this reason, in his opinion “you don’t have to measure a face, but rather see it and listen to it, hear a grimace on that face, a drooping of the eyes… that’s what makes you stay with it.”
In this sense, Dr. Electa Navarrete advocates for aesthetic medicine focused on “emotions.” “When I see a patient, I don’t see a wrinkle or sagging, but I see experiences. I don’t ask her what she wants to take off or wear, but rather what feeling she has when she sees herself in the mirror: if she sees her face as bitter, tired, angry or sad,” she elaborates.
“If we treat the wrinkle impersonally, we are not addressing that sensation that makes you uncomfortable; Now, instead of filling in the groove, as was done before, you work on the cheekbone to eliminate that symptom of sadness, but in such a way that the groove continues to be noticeable, because people have to have wrinkles,” he asserts. For Navarrete, the main problem lies in the fact that “doctors are not used to listening to and understanding the patient, but in aesthetic medicine we cannot limit ourselves to poking them and that’s it, but we have to work based on their experiences.”
In this sense, Navarrete observes that “we have ended up seeing ourselves as objects, not as people, changing our lips like someone changing their coat; but your face is not a spring-summer trend, nor the pantone of the year: your face is you and, if you are looking for medical-aesthetic treatment, it has to be what you need to find your essence.” Because, as the surgeon recalls: “you are not a Kardashian, do not compare yourself to someone you have never seen in your life and who you do not really know what it is like without the spotlights, the filters… This way you will never be satisfied, because you will not “We can base our beliefs on something that is not real.”
