In the fragmented world of materialism, consumerism and individualism, every perception is distorted. Beauty is a construct which has dissolved into a instinctual drive due to the constant bombardment by the world of advertising, Hollywood and all of its poisonous tentacles which stretch deep inside every sanctuary we try and keep pure.
Every face we see, we unconsciously scan for imperfections, our genetic code does a millisecond analysis and concludes if this member is fitting to have offspring with. But we are romantic, we try and read faces for their expressions, emotions, we cling to our stereotypical deductions to put people into molds, from which we conclude who is trustworthy and who can pose a threat. But we dig deeper.
The eyes are the window to the soul, but it doesn't stop at the eyes. The entire face gives us an impression and (like it or not) we give the cute, baby-like, round faces more leverage, bigger benefit of the doubt, whilst the rougher, sharper faces immediately provoke the animal inside to go on edge, to watch out and be prepared. To be careful. Every imperfection throws us off, and the initial impression is very hard to disregard, it takes a lot of time, conversation and insight to delete (or at least diminish) the initial feeling we got off someone.
The person in the image above is not someone who would physically impress us. This is a scared man, the face is not symmetrical, with somewhat strange imperfections spreading all over; peculiar facial hair and hairstyle might intrigue us, but by all standards, this is someone who we would probably avoid, maybe even be threatened by at first (we're talking about the first, millisecond impression).
But we don't know this mans' story! We don't know why he has this soldier-like expression, why he is so upright, uptight, mean-looking even. This is a conclusion we come up with without any real basis, the basis is completely instinctual, without any rational interaction. Emotionally we might even perceive that this is not a happy man. We could even conclude further, from the instincts onward, that the soldier-like expression stretches from a particular event in his past, he might have been abused, had a difficult childhood, a very unhappy love affair and a million other scenarios which we conjure up from our own experiences or from the Hollywood monster which pushes onto us its visions of perfection and where human fault comes from.
Yet, the rational part will always tell us; we just don't know. There is no Sherlock Holmes on this planet, there's a reason why this person is fictional. Although I'm sure some come close with the depth of their deductions, most of us know very little about the art of expression. We usually think we do, but truly we are wrong most of the time. But we always remember the times our first impressions were right about someone (which speaks volumes about us, not about the other person or our deduction skills).
So I think it's good to keep in mind, that first impressions tell a lot more about ourselves than anyone else. We must always keep in mind the possibility that our perception is wrong, that it just might be focused on the wrong things.
Behind what we perceive as an abused, bruised, melancholic, unhappy, imperfect face, there might lay a Lion in disguise...
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