I’ve recently started wearing my contact lens all day at work. I used to just wear them for a couple hours if I go out or when I exercise. They gave me a sense of freedom. No frames to be bound in. No barricades to my expressions. Plus, I got the sense that I look better without my glasses than with them. When you look better, people treat you nicer. Or maybe you treat other people nicer. It’s probably a two-way street.
I remember reading in a drawing book somewhere about the defense of stereotypical faces. It suggested that the bad guys tend to have cartoony ugly faces because their choices in life tended to make that face. The anger, the hate, rough living, fighting, etc. Sometimes our lives do make our faces – you can see it in alcoholics, life-long smokers, meth addicts. An active lifestyle tends to give you a thinner face. An aggressive lifestyle gives you that coarser rough-hewn look. Desperation begets sunken abyssmal features. The celebutantes’ wrinkle-less expressions almost give away their internal superficiality. The older woman’s wrinkles show all the smiles she has given over the years.
Yeah, all overly simplistic, but sometimes worth thinking about the instances where you can see this is true. In other cases though, it seems to have the opposite effect.
In real life, often times the less conventionally pretty people are more defined by their personalities. Some truly ugly people (sorry, truly ugly people) can be quite humble and appreciative, and expect less, through experience perhaps. The disfigured almost never turn into crazed supervillains bent on twisting the world into their image but rather have the goal of not letting it happen to others.
Sometimes the beautiful people take the special attention they get for granted. Or use their Never Get Caught smiles for more deceptive motives. Sometimes they’re just innocently ignorant of all the benefits they receive that others don’t, purely on account of their looks.
I don’t have a point really. I just wonder about these things. About faces and the biology, society and lifestyle factors that made them that way. The story behind that face.
It’s been three days and already I’m beginning to tire of wearing my contacts at work. I don’t want to go back to wearing glasses at work though, because frankly, I like the boundless Super(ficial)man feeling more than the framed Clark Kent restraint. It’s like +10% human interaction bonus without the glasses somehow. I am a captive of my own new freedom.
Vanity is a mirrored cage.
