character

Beauty standards are weird. For the most part, we all agree that they are nonsense, yet so many of us also feel compelled by invisible forces to abide by them. There's a reason that beauty is a billion-dollar industry and why cosmetic surgery has been steadily on the rise.

However, there is a breaking point. When everyone's features start to look the same, the unique beauty of the individual gets lost. We're starting to see beauty "upgrades" become so ridiculously fake and uniform that those "ideal features" are losing their appeal. People are finding themselves yearning to see the very "flaws" and "imperfections" those procedures were designed to erase.

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Case in point: natural teeth. Straight teeth have long been #smilegoals, but today's model chompers go far beyond standard orthodontia. In many cases, famous folks with money to burn are paying thousands of dollars per tooth for veneers that give them smiles that could not be more perfectly straight, white, and aligned. Impressive? Sure. Beautiful? Depends on who you ask.

A montage of older celebrity photos has people lamenting the veneer trend and longing for the days when people's smiles were unique and part of their individual beauty. Some of these folks definitely had braces and some whitening done, but their teeth were still their own. Others clearly embraced their gaps, chips, overlaps, and crookedness, and people are celebrating them for it.

The irony is that some of these people actually had what were considered "perfect" teeth at the time. Veneers really have skewed our perception of what's real and what's not, which is all the more reason for responses like this:

"I miss real people."

"Is it weird to miss regular looking people that were also just uniquely beautiful?"

"I really miss how human everyone looked."

"Real teeth give people's faces more character."

"Did you guys ever think we'd be here reminiscing about natural teeth?"

"Movies from the 90s/00s looked more realistic because hair and teeth and makeup weren't 'perfect.' People looked like people and unique and had their own sense of style."

"Gosh I miss normal faces. The homogenization of the filter botox filler iphone face is brutal and makes me feel so dysmorphic about my own when I'm just like a normal pretty girl."

"I feel like it's really important to let the young ones know that all of these people were considered good looking. They were the beauty standard. We weren't being dentally inclusive. The beauty standards just became more uncanny."

That really sums it up. Beauty standards as a social reality go back millennia—it's not like we just all of a sudden developed them. But they're always morphing based on all kinds of factors, and the current factors are creating a strangely homogenous look when people put all of those standards into practice. The result is that these "beautiful" faces become boring, fake, and yes, uncanny.

We're not meant to look like cartoon characters, and we're not all meant to look alike. We are human. We have unique features and imperfections. There's nothing wrong with wanting to look your best or to wanting change something that might be a distraction rather than a charming element of your physical appearance (looking at you, acne), but a lot of what people lament as flaws are really just part of their unique charm. The number of people gushing over Anna Paquin and Patricia Arquette's crooked teeth should be enough to ease any insecurities people have about their teeth. The reality is that what society's beauty standards deem unattractive are often very attractive to real people.

Maybe it's time we started celebrating the things real people find beautiful instead of going along with artificial, algorithm-created standards designed to feed our insecurities and line the pockets of folks who capitalize on them.