The Beauty of Asymmetry

or, Living the Lopsided Life

I think and speak a lot about symmetry, or the lack of it. We’re trained as plastic surgeons to strive for symmetry in our reconstructive and aesthetic surgeries, recognizing at the same time that the human body is far from symmetric. In my opinion, these subtle differences between our two halves are what make us truly unique and add to each person’s beauty. A few faces come to mind as I write this, including that of the 80’s supermodel Christy Turlington, whose large eyes and arched brows are distinctly different but are nonetheless a striking aspect of her face.

A few years ago, I asked the branding team at Willow & Blake based in Melbourne, Australia, to redesign the logo for my business cards and website. I’d previously worked with them on the rebranding of my skincare line, anokha, and asked their talented designer Sharma Heylen-Silvia, without much direction, to use her imagination and judgment to produce a logo that represented what I do and who I am. She sent me several excellent designs, but this was the one that really struck me and which I eventually selected:

One first glance, it’s a bit shocking - a design that seems to suggest asymmetry, incoherence, whimsey - nothing that a surgeon, and particularly a plastic surgeon, should be espousing. But when I kept looking at it, it suggested something else. The curves are free and flowing, the same way that the human body is. The lines are indeed whimsical, but they start and end with clean strokes, the same way that any good surgical procedure does. The curves might represent breasts (aesthetic breast surgery forms the majority of my surgical work), or they might be just curves. If they are breasts, the body which possesses them might be upright, or it might be tilted. For me, this design represents possibilities, the possibility of the human body as it is, and as it might be. Both are beautiful.

I selected the design and still use it on all materials related to my surgical practice. The response from my patients has been overwhelmingly positive; they love how different and irreverent it is. The response from my colleagues has been a bit different. I was told that it was “very brave” of me to use such a logo, and that it was “quite unusual”. In one case, a website designer cold-emailed me and told me that my website was “frankly unprofessional”. My response to the designer was not kind.

Back to surgery. Over 20 years ago, I performed a study in which I surveyed thousands of breast reconstruction patients to determine their level of satisfaction with their outcomes, in an attempt to parse out what really mattered to them. These were patients who had undergone unilateral or bilateral mastectomies for breast cancer, and who had received either immediate or delayed reconstruction with breast implants or tissue from the abdomen or back. When our statistician crunched the data, the findings surprised us; the type and timing of reconstruction didn’t matter at all. Patients had higher levels of satisfaction that were related to only two factors: 1) reconstruction of the nipple-areolar complex (this is typically removed during mastectomy), and 2) symmetry of the breasts.

The human eye does find beauty in symmetry, and we do in fact strive for this in our work as surgeons. But we also need to recognize that given the inherent asymmetry in our bodies, perfect symmetry is rarely possible. Life itself isn’t symmetric, and we’re often thrown sideways by unexpected events. On occasion, when we look at the world from a curvy, lopsided angle, its beauty becomes even more evident. Try it sometime.

references:

Shaikh-Naidu N, Preminger BA, Rogers K, Messina P, Gayle LB. Determinants of aesthetic satisfaction following TRAM and implant breast reconstruction. Ann Plast Surg. 2004 May;52(5):465-70; discussion 470. doi: 10.1097/01.sap.0000123901.06133.b7. PMID: 15096928.

Bolletta E, McGoldrick C, Hall-Findlay EJ. Aesthetic Breast Surgery: What Do the Measurements Reveal? A Practical Visual Application of the Results. Aesthet Surg J. 2023 Oct 13;43(11):NP866-NP877. doi: 10.1093/asj/sjad243. PMID: 37523745.

https://willowandblake.com/