Have you ever actively considered what your best facial features
are? Could you maybe name them for
someone else? What do you suppose others
– especially strangers – would say are the most pleasing aspects of your looks?
The skin care company DOVE conducted a campaign some time ago, along these very lines: They found that many of us – particularly women
– tend to be critical of how we look. We
minimize what might be our best features, and we focus instead on what we view
as “imperfections”.
This disparaging view of our appearance “impacts everything”, a
participant noted. It affects our jobs,
our relationships, and our overall sense of well-being. When we focus primarily on our “imperfections”
or “flaws”, we tend to overlook or minimize the objectively pleasing aspects of
our looks, and we are less happy than we might otherwise be.
How could Dove help women – and men, too – feel better about
their looks? How might they help people
see the Beauty in their faces, and encourage them toward acknowledgment and
gratitude for their truly attractive features?
The answer was to have a Sketch artists draw the face of each person,
first from
their own descriptions, and then from descriptions of others in the
exercise who had
just met them. The
differences in the sketches were poignant:
The ones drawn
based on what others saw in each participant were much
more pleasing than the
ones drawn from self-description, and each of the subjects
was moved to appreciate
his or her own natural beauty in a whole new way,
seeing themselves through the
eyes of others.
