Today I Appreciate the Assignment to Write About My Face

I look for zits, I look for blotches, and I look for rogue eyebrow hairs, but I never look for much else on my face. It's a funny thing; before this assignment, where I must write a 500-word description of my face, I've never really thought about what makes my face distinctly mine. Sure, I've looked for my parents' qualities in my face (e.g. I have my dad's lips, I have my mom's eyes, etc.), but what is it about my face that makes me my own person and not just an amalgam of genes?

I suppose the answer to that question is that, well, I am simply an amalgam of genes, but my jowls really stick out in kind of a funny, impish way and half my face really is just eyes. I stared at my face in the mirror a long time before I began to write and it became something that wasn't mine; simply slopes and lines and figures and details that all added up to something I couldn't even piece together anymore. It was almost as if I created this disjunctive, floating mental grid of my face, where I tried to maintain a manageable quadrant of features, but they simply kept falling out of place or not piecing together any longer.

Rater than disconcerting, this separation of my face from my persona felt refreshing. At a place like UCLA where a large population of beautiful girls effortlessly glide across campus with grace and style and a kind of fashion panache I will never possess, I feel a constant sense of slight insecurity, of slight concern that I'm not quite admired or appreciated enough for how I look. Yet breaking my face down, seeing it for the features that exist - and not attaching any kind of subjective label to these features - leads me to believe that there is a type of beauty in my wide jowls, in my unruly eyebrows, and in the bump at the top of my nose. It may sound very India.Arie of me (remember? "I'm not the average girl from your video / and I ain't built like a supermodel / but I've learned to love myself unconditionally..." Too much female empowerment), but our features, our differing shapes make us into fascinating creatures, creatures worth noticing and studying and - maybe, but not necessarily - admiring a little bit. Even in the strangest combination of features one can find something interesting even if it's not necessarily "beautiful." After all, the aesthetics of the human face are some of the most interesting pieces of art that exist. The inherent intrigue of the face is, after all, why places like the National Portrait Gallery in London exist. There is nothing more masterfully shaped than the face.

The way one looks is integral to who one is; if I did not have my jowls, my eyes, my eyebrows, I simply wouldn't be this creature known as "Jenae."