Not Just a Beautiful Face: Seeing Beyond Perfection

Author: Gillian Maddigan

August 2025

When doing a face reading or face analysis, we break down the face into its individual parts, its framework: how the bones, ligaments, muscles, and tissues come together. We examine how the features are arranged, their development and expression, how the left and right sides balance, and how the mental, emotional, and physical zones are expressed. We also consider how energy flows between the zones and features. Why? Because collectively they tell a story of creation, presence, expression and influence.

Today, I was contemplating what beauty actually is, and the struggle many beautiful people have in connecting with those of us who don't have that symmetry or balance that draws the eye. 

What is beauty?
Can it be a facade that holds us back from the connections we desire?

After 30 years+ of reading faces and having conversations with truly beautiful people, those others gravitate to, they often say that people only meet them at their beauty. They don’t go any deeper.

In face reading, we look at how you've created your face. What is your journey? What is your facial body language saying about the life you’ve lived? 

Some have cultivated beauty along the way, while others have been blessed with genetics or have made choices to artificially enhance their beauty. Each one of us has made choices along the way, reached crossroads that have moulded our facade, our window to the world, and sometimes, the barrier we place between ourselves and others. That window is our face.

Human beings, like most living things, are drawn to excellence. Our eyes search for safety in balance, harmony, and order. So when we see a face that seems perfect, we’re pulled toward it. But then our own story, insecurities, and trauma begin to filter what we see. We start looking for flaws through our insecurity lens, possibly to protect ourselves or to justify our own choices. We seek to pull things apart so we can feel closer, more equal, connected.

Perfection can be hard to sit with. It reminds us of what we feel we lack.

So what is beauty?

Beauty on the outside is attractive. It draws us in. We want to be near it, bask in the reflected light until we allow it to overshadow our own. But few people look at the journey someone took to become what they are: the development of their features, their choices, their structure, the shaping over time, or powered and coloured or even artificial enhancements and there are always trade-offs.

True beauty is like an amazing Christmas window, carefully set up to draw people in, whether they're aware of it or not. But most viewers of the window never consider what it took to put it together, or how many layers had to fall into place for that beauty to exist, unless they recognise parts that are similar to their own journey.

Sometimes, when you look at a beautiful person, it’s hard to find the door behind the window. And maybe they don’t want you to. Perhaps that beauty serves as a facade, concealing their mess: their secrets, exhaustion, and the many things they do to maintain the image of perfection.

You might see the beauty, but many beautiful people find it difficult to form deep, lasting relationships. Because unless someone can see past the perfection, appreciate the story behind it, and be drawn to the journey with empathy, the connection rarely grows deep roots.

In these deeper conversations, beautiful people often express a longing, not for attention to their appearance, but for someone to reach into the heart behind it. Letting go of that exterior can be terrifying. Because behind it, they may feel vulnerable. Exposed.

And maybe, just maybe, what they really want is to be seen, not just admired.

When you see true beauty, you may have an internal conversation about how much you are in awe of it. Say it out loud, and share your experience. You may change someone's day, world, or life just by observing their beauty from a different lens than their own. And it doesn't have to be the face value; it could be a profound beauty that shines from within.

Your beauty could be your observation, wonder and discernment without artifice or expectation. We all can shine in unique ways.