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Four ideals of beauty should be contemplated when attempting to rejuvenate a face
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KOLOA, Hawaii – Four ideals of beauty – symmetry, skin texture and color, dimorphic shape cues and facial averageness – are important when considering aesthetics with a patient, a presenter said here.
“When we age, all of these things change,” Joely Kaufman, MD, FAAD, said during the “Principles of Aesthetic Oculoplastics” session at the Hawaiian Eye meeting. “Beauty isn’t necessarily what we call age-dependent, but unfortunately with age, these four things that we find attractive get destroyed and disrupted through our lives.”
“I usually sit down in a consultation with a patient and watch the way they speak, the way they animate, which muscles they use and how their face moves when they talk. Those are really important things. You can pick out the best feature on a face very easily and go from there,” Kaufman said.
Joely Kaufman
Symmetrical faces are perceived as more attractive, as well as healthier, more youthful and more genetically fit, she said.
Skin texture and color play a significant role in the judgment of facial beauty and age because age, health and attractiveness are highly influenced by homogeneic pigmentation, according to Kaufman.
“You can actually make a cheek look higher and wrinkles around the eyes look better just by taking off pigmentation,” she said.
Facial averageness is perhaps the most difficult to judge, Kaufman said. Facial averageness is how closely a face resembles the other faces in a particular population.
“If you look through a series of composite images of Miss Universe contestants, you’ll find that many of them look very, very similar,” she said. “Average faces also tend to be more symmetrical.”
Sexually dimorphic features are where the injection world is having some trouble, according to Kaufman.
She has noted many instances where aesthetic changes made to a man have made him seem more feminine and changes to a woman have made her seem more masculine. She reminded audience members that the male has a prominent cheekbone, a thinner cheek, a larger mandible and thin lips and the female has an arched brow, a thinner chin and jaw and a fuller cheek. –by Daniel Morgan
Disclosure: Kaufman is a member of the advisory board for Allergan and Merz Pharmaceuticals; and is a contracted researcher for Merz Pharmaceuticals and Revance.