TikTok and Instagram, filters show our more symmetrical and regular face. But do we really like it more?

On Instagram it is called «SymmetryAnd it is a filter that homologates the two parts of the face, duplicates one and places the two copies side by side, so that there are no differences between the right and left sides. On TikTok there is the now very popular “Inverted Filter», Which reverses the image reflected in the mirror and reveals how other people see us and how we never manage to see ourselves.

The general idea is that symmetry and specularity lead to greater beauty: “It is as if it satisfies the need for order in this strange universe we are in,” explains Alan Paige Lightman, physicist and professor of Humanities Practice at Mit ,.

Actually – try it! – it’s not quite like that: that duplicated half face looks decidedly different from the face we really have and are used to and this could seem disturbing to us, no longer as preferable as we would have expected. And the same goes for the image that the Inverted Filter gives us: if we have a fold that we are used to seeing on the right, it is strange to see it on the left. Either a scar, a mole, or an eye that’s smaller than another. Try it: it seems like nothing, but something changes, and how it changes.

More than ten years ago, the American photographer Alex John Beck had done a project-experiment he called «Both Sides of»: He had made portraits by duplicating the right half and the left half of the face. Absolutely regular, those faces are unnatural to the human eye and dispel the myth of symmetry as a golden measure of beauty.