The Ugly Face

The Ugly Face is substandard. Its proportions are asymmetrical, its features misaligned. It is stretched, dissected, and textured. It is measured against a formulaic ideal, its features calculated against Fibonacci's golden ratio — and found wanting. It exists in a system that assigns value to symmetry, to a mathematical fiction feigning as beauty. It is compared, calculated, and ultimately reduced — less face, more failure.

Beauty has never been neutral — it has always been a way of standardising desirability, of refining exclusion. The Ugly Face is not simply a face that fails to conform; it is an act of defiance, an artifact of miscalculation.

By digitally stitching and unwrapping the faces of my closest friends into vertex maps and superimposing golden ratio calculations, I attempt to quantify the unquantifiable. What does it mean to rank our faces against an arbitrary formula? What does it mean to trust a ratio over a person?

The Ugly Face is a satirical take on idealised beauty standards. It is not an attempt to redeem asymmetry, nor to restore it to a more authentic beauty. Instead, it amplifies distortion and turns the logic of aesthetic quantification against itself, revealing the absurdity of its claims. If beauty can be measured, it can also be manufactured and manipulated. And if it can be measured, then it can be — must be — refused.