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Being asymmetrical makes your face less beautiful, but being symmetrical does not necessarily make it more beautiful. There's lots of unattractive faces with very high symmetry - a weak jaw or bulbous nose is not hotter cause it's symmetrical. And this is obvious! 1/
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It's so painfully obvious that there's a lot of way more important factors that go into an attractive face than just both sides looking the same. All you have to do is look at a face and notice what you like. So how the hell did "beauty = symmetry" become such a popular idea??
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It kind of freaks me out that I've heard this simple story (as in, the importance of symmetry elevated much higher than it is) repeated uncritically by so many people, when it's a story so easy to doubt by simply paying attention to our experience.
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Streetlight Effect, I reckon. Facial symmetry is easy to measure and quantify, so that's what the papers are about, so that's what the science press release news articles are about
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Order is beautiful for some reasons. Probably bc we can trust it so we are wired so to be attracted to order? Symmetrical order is the most technically reproducible, but is not the only one, i.e. Fractal order exists and so on... wrote a book on not trusting beauty.
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It is not a mere socially constructed idea. Face asymmetry is related to prenatal or early childhood parasitic infestation, so it is understandable that it serves as a sexual selection criteria, such as parasite resistance.
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