Tom Head

Just watched a YouTube segment from Adam Pearson’s Beauty and the Beast: The Ugly Face of Prejudice (Channel 4). Although Adam has neurofibromatosis, not Crouzon Syndrome, I am often struck by how similar we sound—how similar the viewpoints of people who live with pathologized facial deformities/disfigurements often sound, regardless of the condition, its perceived origin, its perceived severity, or the details of their lives.

When I talk about my feelings as somebody with Crouzon, the general reaction I get from friends is “you can’t notice it”/”you can barely notice it.” I have absolutely no idea whether or not this is true. No friend is going to tell me that I’m noticeably and significantly disfigured if I am, nor is a friend likely to make mental note of it themselves once they’ve spent any significant amount of time around me.

And the people who have told me that I’m noticeably and significantly disfigured either have an agenda (usually because they’re medical professionals trying to get me to have high-risk, low-reward reconstructive surgery) or hate me for unrelated reasons (conservative men, I’ve noticed, have a particularly keen eye for craniofacial conditions; I still remember, to my discredit, the anonymous fool on one local blog who several years ago wrote a rather nasty post that began “saw you tabling at Fondren After 5…”).

The most honest commentary I think I ever got about my face was from an old friend of mine who admitted that I was not especially attractive in a conventional sense, that it would not be too far off the mark to call me odd-looking, but that I had a more pleasant face than many people who were perceived as more beautiful. My face made her feel comfortable and loved, she explained, and she thought I even had that effect on strangers—that I had a welcoming smile, that I looked very non-threatening. I believe her. I think this is probably the closest thing to an objective assessment of my face that I’ll ever get.

Another friend of mine, an experienced model with a stunningly beautiful but unusual look owing in part to her Dutch-Cherokee ancestry, once told me that novelty is very important to a mature, world-weary definition of beauty—that while laypersons tend to think of beauty as being close to an established norm, real artists and photographers in the modeling industry are always looking for something outside of the norm, something new, something that they don’t expect to see. A conventionally beautiful face, in the eyes of haute couture, can be a very bland face; what many would call ugly, the best minds in fashion might call bold, powerful, and creative. You can’t challenge and redefine an aesthetic by conforming to it.

All of this is to say that I just don’t know what to make of faces—mine or others—and that as I continue to work on this book proposal for a social history of the human face, I’m having to confront some personal demons. “Write what you know,” indeed. I will probably never know how much my Crouzon-related issues are due to my “objective” unattractiveness, to borrow a scientifically invalid term from Kanazawa, and how much are just due to a face-centric form of body dysmorphia. But I’m not sure it matters, in the end. What matters more is that I choose the company of people who, for whatever reason, find me beautiful, and avoid the company of people who, for whatever reason, do not.

An addendum to all that: there is a misconception that conventionally attractive people are shallower than most people. This has not been my experience. My experience has been that stupid people tend to be shallow and smart people tend to be deep, regardless of what they look like. I’ve found no correlation with looks.