Symmetrical faces are considered to be beautiful, but is it really so? One photographer decided to experiment and see how the people who have absolutely symmetrical halves of the face will look like.
As you know, each person’s right half of the face is somehow different from the left one, and nobody has the full symmetry. But many believe that symmetric faces are “correct” and beautiful. A 32-year-old photographer from New York, Alex John Beck, decided to check this statement. He photographed a large group of people of different ages and then reproduced unattainable absolute symmetry of the face on a computer. Here are absolutely symmetrical faces recreated from the left (a photo on the left) and right (a picture on the right) halves of real people faces.
Alex says he was surprised by how much people differ from the individuals, whose faces were composed of symmetrical halves. At first, he reproduced the person duplicating the right half, and then the left one, and the difference was very noticeable. If a person’s face is made up of two left halves, it seems fuller and wider, while two right halves make the face leaner and more harmonious. These pictures show that everyone does have the “best” and “worst” sides of the face.
However, the right halves of the face are not always beautiful. For instance, this girl almost happened to squint when the right sides of the face were connected, whereas two left halves gave the perfect location of the eyes. Psychologists believe that the left half of the face expresses emotions more than the right one, so the faces made of two left halves seemed surprised and even disappointed.
The photographer claims that he perceives beauty in the same way as everyone else. But this experiment helped him to test whether fully symmetrical faces were more beautiful. Alex himself does not think so, but he welcomes us to draw our own conclusions.
