Let’s Stop Inventing The “Perfect” Face, Please

The Daily Mail recently published a piece that states “the perfect woman does not exist” but is rather a composite of five different celebrities whose specific features were used to create an imaginary woman. Here’s the back story: 2,000 British beauty professionals were polled on the features they favor most in celebrities. Their answers were combined with a little digital magic to create the “perfect” woman. She has Kate Middleton‘s hair, Kim Kardashian‘s eyelashes and oval shaped-face, Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger’s lips, actress Michelle Keegan’s lips and British TV star Lucy Mecklenburgh’s tan. The outcome of this creepy experiment looks like this:

So there you have it. A person who doesn’t even exist—made up of a bunch of famous people’s features— is supposed to be our latest beauty ideal. And this isn’t the first time the theoretical make up of a woman’s face was dissected and reassembled like a science project in the name of beauty. There are so many dangerous examples of these “perfect” imaginary faces comprised of celebrity parts and pseudo-science. Remember the plastic surgeon who created the math equation for the “perfect” face?

If that doesn’t ring a bell, maybe the name Frankenstein does. Even if you haven’t read the book or seen the story on screen, you still probably know what happens: Dr. Frankenstein attempted to create a man out of multiple people’s spare parts, and ended up creating a monster. And that’s exactly what these kinds of “studies” are doing.

We’re not supposed to chop up images of women and Photoshop different features onto different faces in an attempt to make the standards of beauty so narrow they are physically impossible for a human woman to achieve. You have to be a picture on a screen in order to live up to this seriously misguided ideal. But what good is this woman who can only ever exist as a picture? You can’t be her family, you can’t be the great love of her life, you can’t be her best friend. This imaginary woman only exists to make flesh and blood women feel like they are not enough.

The last thing we need to do is to be narrowing the standards of beauty. We need to be expanding standards and we need to expand them wider than ever before. We need to be celebrating the beauty of all nose shapes and all hair lengths/textures. We have given so much power to these made-up monsters. We need to take away that power and give it back to real women.