Wild...Beauty: In the Eye of the Beholder (and Through a Cultural Lens)

Rebbeca Brown
There Isn’t a True Standard for “Beauty”

That’s not to say, of course, that there aren’t certain types of features that more people in certain regions might find preferable.  That’s naturally the case.  But many of us, both women and men, look at a feature or a flaw we have as individuals, and think, “That’s ugly,” or “if only it were more like this” because we’ve gotten it into our heads that that way is the perfect way.
The truth of the matter is that there’s no perfect beauty, and that even working with the same face and the same features, none of the editors who took it upon themselves to restructure or accessorize Esther did so in the same fashion.  One saw her face as being more beautiful if more angular, while another felt it should be softer—and those preferences weren’t just regional, as edits from contributors from the same countries were just as different from one another as they were from those from other regions.
That one thing that’s “wrong” with your face, that you see, probably isn’t “wrong” to someone else.  Your flaws are simply what you don’t like.  And even if they are flaws which aren’t appealing to the mainstream observer in your culture, that still doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with your face—somewhere, to someone, it’s beautiful.