BY: KAROUN CHAHINIAN
With the alarm clock blaring, you wake up abruptly, roll out of bed and walk over to the sink half asleep. After washing your face and attempting to wipe away your exhaustion, you look in the mirror and feel like you’re being attacked by all your worst insecurities. “Big nose,” “small eyes,” “crooked teeth,” “bad acne,” “dark circles,” and an endless array of harsh comments go through your mind.
Everyone wants to change at least one thing about themselves. No matter how many cheesy songs are written about embracing your imperfections, we all still catch ourselves occasionally thinking about our ideal appearances where all our “flaws” are corrected. Photographer Scott Chasserot was able to bring a few people’s ideal selves to life through his project “Original Ideal,” which was described as a combination of “portrait photography and neuroscience” on his website.
Chasserot took simple and unadorned head shots of his volunteers, then by using an editing software, he made dozens of altered versions based on the “scientifically established canons of beauty.”
By presenting the edited photos to the volunteers while they wore EEG headsets, Chasserot was able to analyze their brain waves and identify which version they preferred the most based on positive neural reactions. The preferred photo was then labeled as their “ideal” appearance.
Through this project, Chasserot is attempting to identify “what we find instinctively beautiful in the human face and how [that] translates to self-image.”
Here are a few examples of the results (altered images are on the right):
Sources: originalideal.com, vimeo.com
