We’re sorry to bring you this news, but humans are becoming less attractive.
At least that’s according to a facial expert who posted a comprehensive video explaining his findings on TikTok.
Shafee Hassan is the founder of facial aesthetics consultancy firm QOVES. He posted a clip on social media sharing his theory that modern living conditions have affected how people look over recent years.
He says in the clip: “The average person's face is becoming increasingly disadvantaged by modern diets, sleeping patterns, pollutants and orofacial habits creating a greater inequality in ‘the attractives’ vs ‘the unattractives’.”
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The video sees Hassan begin by asking the viewer if they’ve ever considered why teenagers in the 1950s looked so much older in pictures than teenagers do now.
Picking out one example, he studies one man’s “gonion”, which is the top of the lower jaw and his cheekbone.
Considering how people’s face shapes have changed over the years, he said: “There are multiple theories about why this is the case, but the one that makes the most intuitive sense at least to me is presented in Contemporary Orthodontics by [US orthodontist William] Proffit and colleagues using what's know as the functional matrix hypothesis.”
He went on to consider that the “development of the face is dependent on the forces you put on it, for the upper and lower jaw” – which according to Hassan are two of the most important things when it comes to attractiveness.
The clip then shows the importance of the jaw developing correctly, stating that certain elements can impact upon it and the tongue can “[push it downwards or outwards” before it has grown properly.
It focuses on one case involving a young girl who had a sinus infection which means she was forced to breathe through her mouth, thus stopping the bone from developing.
“With 70 per cent of the Western world, having some kind of malocclusion or recession, much like this, it's a very good explanation for why faces are becoming less and less attractive as time goes on,” he added, summing up the clip.
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