In my illustration class, we just finished a project where we were assigned to make two caricatures of well-known professors on campus. This project took me through my typical range of emotions I experience with any art assignment: frustration, embarrassment, annoyance, a hint of creative joy, and then back to frustration. Something interesting happened with this project though. It got me looking at people in a different way. I was warned when I decided to become an art major that it would change the way I saw the world. I feared this. I didn’t want to turn into an art freak. While I don’t think I’ve earned that title quite yet, I definitely am starting to see the change in my perception. For weeks I’ve been walking around and picturing everyone I see as a caricature. As I worked on my project, I was instructed to find my subjects’ distinguishing characteristics and exaggerate those and really just play off of their uniqueness. For my particular subjects this meant exaggerating their face shapes, glasses, facial hair, and whatever other little unique characteristics I could find. I had fun with this project for the most part because I’m kind of bad at making people look realistic when I draw them anyways so this gave me some flexible room to work with intentional flaws.
On the day we critiqued our caricatures as a class, Professor Hopper said something that I found rather intriguing. He was talking about how research was done through an experiment using Photoshop where a large number of a variety of faces was combined to produce one face. Essentially, they combined faces to produce what we would consider an ‘”average” face more or less. The result was a face that was neither male nor female but it was described as being very beautiful. So what does this mean? It means we consider average to be beautiful. I find this annoying. I mean I get it and I buy into it as much as the next person but isn’t that a little narrow minded of us? With the great variety that God has created in us as individuals, doesn’t it seem a little bit backwards that we strive for average rather than celebrating what makes us uniquely beautiful? Why are we most proud of our characteristics that are closest to the average of everyone else? Additionally, I have another thought that is kind of related to this topic of what we define as beautiful. Along with the irony of how we esteem average as beautiful, I think it’s also quite curious how we strive for what we don’t have. Here in the Western culture it’s common for us Caucasians to associate having darker skin with beauty. Helllooo tanning bed industry!!! Now let me clarify. I of all people am a prime example of this so I’m speaking to myself here I’m sure more than any of you. I love tanning. I love dark skin. I kind of wish I was born Native American most days. But you know what’s funny? People with dark skin across the world desire just the opposite. They want fair white skin. My cousin lived in China this past summer and when he came back and was telling us about his experience that was something that stuck out to me. He talked about this irony of how we all seem to be working towards getting this look that we weren’t created to have. I found an article that talks about how in Asia the beauty industry is all about whitening lotions and correctors that are meant to in essence bleach the skin. Human nature is funny. We want what we don’t have. We strive to change so many parts of ourselves that in reality are probably way better left as they are.
I think beauty is so much more than we let it be. I think it’s everywhere, in everyone, in every different color of skin and every different size and shape of head, nose, ears, and eyes. I think beauty is comforting and inspiring and healing and powerful. I think it’s time to redefine beauty.
If you’re interested in reading more on the study and article I referred to I’ve included the links.
I couldn’t find an article on the same study but here is a similar one that was done:
http://www.ideabounty.com/blog/post/2525/dear-photoshop-can-the-prettiest-woman-on-the-planet-be-more-average
Article on Asian beauty industry:
http://edition.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/east/05/13/asia.whitening/
Friends,
You are beautiful and you are loved.
Blessings.
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