Has Our Vision of Beauty Changed? By Charlotte Ravet

Over the past few years, I have developed and trained for several academies and brands, and I started interrogating myself about the codes of beauty I have learnt and how the perfect features are identified today.

I often say to my students that I can teach them skills but not taste. This belongs to them. Taste is subjective. It evolves and changes as fashion goes. Who never looked at a photo from a few years in all fashionable outfit and realised: What was I thinking?

I have studied the story of beauty and the origins of the ‘perfect face’, which should look like an oval with three equal parts. This theory of beauty has been primarily inspired by Albrecht Dürer, a German painter from the sixteen century who created profiles and front drawings of the face with mathematical precision.

To date, we are still using the same ideology of beauty to teach makeup and beauty. But over the past ten years, I started to interrogate myself: is the oval face shape still the ideal? Women and men are now dreaming of features with more angles: cheekbones are more prominent, the jaw more defined, the nose thinner, the chin more pointy.

Scientists have now identified up to nine face shapes, but the ones we usually refer to are the oval, the oblong, the diamond, the square, the rectangle and the round. Looking at these shapes, two of them seem now to be closer to the new idea of beauty: the heart and the diamond. Both have the particularity to have defined cheekbones and defined angles. When I work with these features, I like to enhance cheekbones, adding an extra shadow on the temple to create more depth and give more volume to the cheeks. When I look at my clients, I see different beauty tastes, trends, and visions of an ideal that change through the place I travel.

The idea of beauty has never been the same from one country to another, but it was more attached to cultural background and access to beauty treatments. In a large part of Europe, the cost of cosmetic surgery remains pretty high, and injections are not yet widespread in Southern Europe. Korean beauty standards prioritise the « V-shape » with large eyes and a pointy chin. I am fascinated by the extreme Korean makeup trends we can see online.

Our facial attributes contribute to the attractiveness and the social image we reflect others.

With the rise of social media, we now can get noticed, sometimes based on physical attributes exclusively. A new emerging trend is total acceptance, and people are not ashamed anymore of their acne and scars. H&M even created a campaign with a model with a few breakouts and no makeup on the skin. Social media has definitely contributed to changing the vision of beauty. It is not essential anymore to be solely beautiful to get noticed. But you must exist and be different, unique.

As an educator and makeup artist, I feel it is crucial to update my techniques constantly, but I have been conflicted by so many different makeup trends over the past years! I have kept the same methods to create highlighting and shadowing, but I have evolved how I am placing them to create faces with more angles lately. I had more and more requests for sculpted features than when I started, and the oval face does not seem to be the ideal everyone wants to have. Who knows what is going to be next?

So what is the beauty in 2021? A beauty that evolves, a beauty that changes, a beauty that is everything but universal. Beauty is what pleases the viewer’s eyes, what creates emotion and a feeling of happiness. Beauty is not unique but universal.

Having worked with some gorgeous women, I also keep in mind that beauty is not only physical. I realised that perfection does not mean attraction at the early stage of my career: a genuine smile works a thousand times better than perfect teeth to bring you joy.

Charlotte has taught make-up students and performers at N.I.D.A. developed workshops for Maqpro, Franck Provost and Marie France and created and developed the beauty advisor training program for Manicare and Priceline. After being the head educator for a leading makeup academy in Melbourne, Charlotte came back to Paris as the International retail and artistry education trainer for the brand By Terry. Learn more about Charlotte and her work at www.charlotteravet.com