yassified eugenics
Why facemaxxing and "good feature/bad facial harmony" trends are more harmful than they seem.
Every time I see a video captioned “good facial features but bad facial harmony,” something inside me squirms. Something about this content doesn’t sit right with me. The voice inside my head keeps telling me that something nefarious is lurking behind this trend. So I went digging.
For the uninitiated “good facial features but bad facial harmony” (or vice versa) is a TikTok trend where creators, mostly young women, zoom the camera onto their facial features to point out their good/bad features. Sometimes this is to prove that despite their bad features they have good facial harmony. Other times it is to mourn that their facial harmony isn’t up to the mark despite their good features.
Even if you haven’t come across this trend, you certainly must have crossed paths with facemaxxing videos, where creators superimpose a celebrity’s face over a “perfect” template to make their features more attractive (read: euro-centric). It is the more insidious child of “looksmaxxing,” the trend birthed by the manosphere — a collection of websites and online forums promoting toxic masculinity, misogyny, and meninism — which advises men to become their “best selves” in any way possible.
From going to the gym and following a skin care regimen (softmaxxing) to getting limb lengthening surgeries and cosmetic procedures to change their facial features (hardmaxxing), looksmaxxing is all about hitting a certain set standard. What’s that I hear? Body dysmorphia and eating disorders? Yeah, that sounds about right.
In this essay, I shed some light on how TikTok (and other short-form video platforms in extension) is repackaging the rhetorics of eugenics as “becoming your best selves” pills.
To unpack the dark underbelly of facemaxxing and allied trends, we need to understand its origins. The term “facial harmony” originated among cosmetic surgeons. If you Google the term, you can find hundreds of blogs on how to achieve facial harmony, all from the websites of cosmetic surgery clinics. While the cosmetic surgery industry’s capitalizing on women’s bodies via strategised marketing and trend-peddling is something I have a lot of thoughts on, today’s endeavour is different.
In cosmetic surgery, facial harmony translates to the size of various facial features and overall facial symmetry which is often achieved by following the golden ratio. Apparently, faces that follow the standards of this measurement are perceived as more attractive than others.
The concept of the “golden ratio” was first introduced by the Greek mathematician Euclid in his mathematical treatise The Elements (308 B.C.). Now Euclid never attached psychological properties to this ratio. He merely stated that such a ratio exists.
So then who created the myth of the golden ratio? The answer is Adolf Zeising.
In the 19th century, German philosopher Adolf Zeising set out to prove that the “golden ratio” was the key to all beauty in nature. He wrote that the golden ratio is “the universal law in which is contained the ground principle of all formative striving for beauty and completeness in the realms of both nature and art.” He said that the golden ratio is present in everything “whether cosmic or individual, organic or inorganic, acoustic or optical” and that it “finds its fullest realization, however, in the human form.”
Over the years, there have been multiple attempts to prove that the Parthenon in Greece and the Pyramids in Egypt are aesthetically pleasing because they follow the golden ratio. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.
“Attempts to demonstrate diagrammatically that any of these structures fit a golden rectangle or otherwise are speculative and appear to be due to extreme persistence in attempting to fit the golden ratio onto the structure,” Orthodontist Dr Farhad B. Naini writes in his paper “The golden ratio — dispelling the myth” clarifying that these monuments don’t actually follow the golden ratio.
He also dismisses the theory — popularised by Dan Brown’s best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code — that Leonardo da Vinci employed the ratio in his works featuring the human form, including the Mona Lisa.
The earlier mentioned facemaxxing template you see on social media is said to be based on the golden ratio and is supposed to make you look more attractive. But if you take a closer look, you can see that all it does is make your nose and lips smaller, your eyes almond-shaped, and your face thinner. In other words, completely butcher your ethnic features and make you look like a sun-burned Caucasian.
For instance, take a look at the results of this facemaxxing done to American Rapper GloRilla:
But when it was done on Angelina Jolie there was hardly any change:
Look at the “perfect version” of Zendaya’s face:
You get the gist.
Facial harmony achieved through following the golden ratio is actually just repackaged featurism — the prejudice against Black and Brown features and preference for Euro-centric features.
Arguing that the golden ratio is rooted in science and that it is inherently found in all forms of nature, is a way to establish that the features of non-white people are “unnatural.” When you call your features “bad,” you are falling prey to this racist rhetoric. Your features aren’t bad, they are beautiful, they just aren’t European.
In the 19th century, Nazi eugenics made us believe that the shape of our skulls was a window to our personalities and mental health issues. This pseudoscientific theory — phrenology — was later used to justify white supremacy, slavery, and even the Holocaust.
In the 21st century, we use the same theories repackaged as harmless girly pop trends to microanalyse our faces and come to the conclusion that we are sub-humans, that we aren’t our best selves until we have achieved a certain racist ideal of beauty.
Conformity is a slippery slope. While in the beginning, it can provide a sense of community and belonging, soon it will lead to turning a blind eye to the horrors in our society.
In the case of beauty standards, conformity leads to cementing the racist, white-supremacist, Euro-centric idea of beauty. It leads to many large-scale issues, including what we call Snapchat dysmorphia, a disturbing trend where young women are seeking cosmetic procedures to look like their filtered faces. Another example of the real-world problems of conformity in beauty trends is the phenomenon now termed the “Love Island effect” — young viewers of the reality show “Love Island” getting cosmetic procedures to look like the participants in the show.
According to a 2018 study, 40% of the show’s audience felt inadequate in their bodies after watching the show with 30% considering cosmetic treatments to rectify this inadequacy. In 2021, when the show aired the search volume of “Botox” increased a whopping 82% times (in the UK where the show is based).
The after-effect of these phenomena is Instagram faces — faces with cat eyes, small noses, large lips, and high cheekbones featuring a blank emotion popular among Instagram models and influencers, usually achieved through plastic surgery and fillers; and Botox Paradox — a term coined by Beauty critic Jessica DeFino to explain how conformity and Botox faces are leading to a decrease in sexual activity among young people.
“Loneliness is on the rise and so I do wonder if there’s a link between the rise of Botox in the same demographics experiencing feelings of disconnection and sexual frustration,” DeFino tells Dazed in an article titled “Has Botox killed eroticism?”
In the full interview DeFino shared in her newsletter, she says, “[Botox] change the way we connect and communicate with others — even reducing our capacity to feel empathy — by freezing our muscles and eliminating our ability to make microexpressions and mirror other people’s expressions.”
All this is to say that our differences don't make us weird. It makes us unique. Embrace it. Because when we embrace our unique features, we also embrace our heritage, ancestry, and the fundamentals of who we are. Conformity is not the answer, learning to accept yourself is.
Let’s also relearn the notion that social media trends are harmless. Granted, not all social media trends need to be analysed. But when a trend tries to tell you something is wrong with you, think critically: “Are they trying to sell me something?” If yes, RUN!
Brilliant piece! Lovely reminder to stay grounded because it’s so so so SO easy to get swept away by these seemingly-harmless appearing microtrends!
a little late to this piece, i just came across it and damn did it hit home. i feel really grateful that i didn’t have the kind of money in my mid-twenties that would have made cosmetic procedures easily accessible, because i think i was gullible enough to fall for those kinds of trends and beauty standards and i could have gone through with it.
i had this really bad phase of microanalyzing my facial features, fixating on the fact that my left eye was slightly smaller than my right, and so was my left nostril. which, who the fuck cares about uneven nostrils? it’s almost funny but also kinda sad
it’s been a while since i was in that phase, but i still see a lot of people, especially young women, falling for the same trends because they’re still circulating on social media. your analysis really opened a new door for me in how i see this. thank you for writing this.