Try this simple test. Take a photo of your face, dead on.

The plastic surgeons say that you should be able to take a pen and divvy up your mug shot into three equal horizontal sections: forehead, brow to nose, nose to chin.

The plastic surgeons say that if you draw a line straight down the middle of your face, you should have two sides that mirror, exactly, one another.

If any of this doesn’t balance out just right, the plastic surgeons say that they can help you fix it—for just a stitch over four thousand dollars.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The problem is that the eye in question is usually lodged in a human skull, next to a human brain. A brain that tells us symmetrical is beautiful. What is balanced is best fit.

Evolution meant that the best built beasties were the ones that survived and flourished. The offsets, the mutants with eyes in weird places and uneven legs, were devoured by the justified of the natural world. The animals that learned to appreciate the proportionality as attractive were the ones that were best at setting up genetic franchises. Even subtle flaws in symmetry were subconscious hints that Mr. Skewed wasn’t Mr. Right.

Now, our biology makes us unwitting connoisseurs of balance in structure. Studies have shown that even babies prefer to look at images of symmetrical faces rather than images of their own mother. Slews of studies featuring twins, computer-generated caricatures, and supermodels have shown that almost every culture and ethnic background holds these same standards for beauty and lust.

Maybe for good reason.

Statistical studies from places like Brandeis University, Drexel University, Northeastern University, the University of Western Australia, and the University of New Mexico (among many others) have hinted that individuals with uneven eyes, bent noses, and crooked smiles are also more likely to have a tilted existence. The more unsymmetrical, the more open someone is to depression, bipolar disease, and schizophrenia. The Picasso people are more likely to have trouble conceiving children and may have shorter life spans.

All this makes a good argument that our collective culture will eventually snowball into a planet of beautiful freaks. It’s possible that we’ll someday filter out the physiologically unbalanced, and become the eugenic culture envisioned by such forward thinking schmucks as Hitler.

But we won’t.

What marks us a progressive species is that we, on some level, have always been able to appreciate a twist—a deviation from the standard that makes our society doubletake at our own perspectives.

Like it or not, the physiological manifestation of our species reflects our diversity as a collective culture. Deviation from the ideal of beauty may come with other psychological and biological skews, but these aren’t dead ends. Only a manic depressive could have produced Mozart’s symphonies. Sometimes it takes a schizophrenic to paint in a way you’ve never seen before. In fact some of the best painters in history were folks with a lazy eye--a condition that forced them to see with no depth perception, but allowed them to see the perfect way to paint the three dimensional world on a two dimensional canvas.

There is no need to be the best model of our species. The truth is that there is no such thing. Our abnormalities are what mark us as individuals. It keeps our society full of different faces and varying perspectives. It allows us to have different tastes and preferences. And in many ways, it keeps us all on a fairly even playing field. It’s part of what allows us to give evolution the finger, and grow in our own, human way.

So if you really want to enhance your aesthetic appeal, get an odd face piercing or put a plate in your lip. Get your ears unevened, or get your face sagged. We’ll never weed out the unsymmetrical, the unbalanced—because humanity needs an edge.