I’m fascinated by the movie Frozen, but not for the reasons most parents would think. And no, this isn’t about freezing your face with Botox. It’s about baby faces – but on young adult women. It’s well-known that baby-faced adults have an air of innocence and vulnerability (think early Paul McCartney, Leo di Caprio and Meg Ryan) and get off more lightly with misdemeanours -- court judgements even -- as they’re seen to be less likely to be guilty of crimes, and more trustworthy.
Although the Disney/Pixar argument about 'baby' Princess Faces is nothing new, why are we still conditioning our children to think that the heart-shaped face with tiny upturned nose, huge eyes and little ‘geisha mouth’ is the ideal of beauty? It's also the wrong face for a strong Frozen heroine. In Chinese Face Reading this face is considered very Yin: an extreme stereotype of the ‘perfect’ female face.
If you’ve read UK feminist writer and Psychoanalyst Susie Orbach, you’ll know that trying to be the ‘perfect girl’ can cause endless problems with eating disorders, self harm, lack of true self-esteem and self-love. Even badass heroines like Merida in Brave and China Doll in Oz the Great and Powerful have this Barbie clone face. It’s not like the movie industry doesn’t have great role models : Sigourney Weaver’s star jaws, the strong noses of Meryl Streep, Helen Bonham-Carter and Patrician Arquette. No, the unconscious, lazy reframing of the Barbie doll-face in children’s movies is still the homogenized propaganda from ‘family friendly’ Disney.
Ideals of beauty have come and gone: foot binding, facial scarring or tattoos, and metal bands to elongate the neck. And yet in the West we’re still propagating this throwback Yin face which was considered the ideal in the male-orientated, ancient Japanese and Chinese societies which promoted patriarchal values. In Japan the art of face-reading was applied in all areas of life, particularly in business, in arranging marriages, as well as diagnosing health problems.
In the old Japanese texts on Nin So Mi , which literally means ‘reading the appearance of the body’, the facial attributes of a sought-after female partner are quite specific and are closely associated with the sexuality of the individual: oval face shapes are the most feminine in manners, attitudes and appearance and more dependent; rounded hairlines and half-moon eyebrows are considered seductive, sentimental and romantic signals; large eyes with rounded lids show strong sex drive, goodwill and co-operation with knowledge of coquetry and feminine wiles. And the disturbingly small noses of our Pixar Princesses are described as belonging to those who are naive, susceptible, and not dominant: noses should be less than a third of the face, refined, shapely and with a concave bridge according to Nin So Mi!
This snub-nosed emoji face has morphed into Daddy’s Little Princess: an unrealistic, non-role model which is slotted neatly into young minds. In the visual age of Skype, cosmetic surgery, Pixar animation and Botox we know children absorb lots of messages from the media, cartoons, and commercials. and such facial characteristics as unusually large doe eyes or big/small noses have a subliminal influence on how children think and behave. And for adults, for instance, hotels such as the Mondrian Miami Beach has a modern ‘Sleeping Beauty’ gender stereotype in every bedroom.
On a broader level, this archetypal face-pattern is symbolic of women (the yin aspect of our binary world) ‘carrying the can’ for the growth over the past 400 years of our yang civilisation, industrial revolutions, empire building, and warmongering. The yang has been dominant, and the yin has remained in the 'shadow'. Just look around – India, Congo, the Middle East. Despite this global cycle coming to an end, a deeply individual cycle just a few years away and women making huge advances, it appears the Barbie-Cinderella face has still got a way to go yet -- picture of Fairy Godmother gear in today's supermarket. The beauty industry and the media know that archetypes (the ideal, young, blonde, blue-eyed, unmarked face) sell products.