Due to my work, I have had the 'pleasure' of being around hundreds of thousands of people over the last eight years and I have seen a lot of faces. I have seen every race and culture represented, save the indigenous that never leave their homes.
In seeing these many faces I have observed that the overwhelming majority of them fit a standard mold while only a few of them are exceptional. Those faces stand out because they are amazingly beautiful or strikingly ugly. Many have just been born that way, their looks being the result of happy accident or cruel fate.
Sure, there are ones after birth who have made themselves better looking through cosmetics, working out, and plastic surgery but with those techniques you can only do so much. And as concerns ugly, some born common have along the way met with misfortune or brought it upon themselves. Some faces bear scars, some tattoos, some have medical conditions that have disfigured them.
The beauty of it is you won’t even have to work out to look like this….
Henri Meihac- Unsplash.com
As well, the bodies I observe are more or less the same but there are those that stick out, the ones that I spot in a crowd and fixate on, me being unable to look away due to those bodies being striking compared to the ones around them. These bodies are extraordinarily fat, thin, tall, or short, or they are crippled, missing limbs, or having one withered arm, things like that.
I bring this up because the potential exists now for designer babies who, through gene manipulation, will only be beautiful. Their eyes will be blue or green, which currently are rare traits. Their hair will be lush and full, blonde for the women, of various colors for the men, and that hair might be curly or wavy, which is also rare, for most people's hair is straight.
Their noses will be perfect, ditto their cheekbones. They'll have wide mouths and smiles full of pearly white teeth. Their bodies will be lithe. Men will have solid builds with tiny butts and women will have curves in all the right places.
Women's breasts will be enhanced and so will men's equipment. The women will have long eyelashes and full lips, both sexes will have perfectly formed ears that hug the sides of their heads, and men will have the square chin of Superman. When the replacement for me shows up at the airport of the future all he will see is supermodels everywhere and the world will be a very beautiful (albeit bland and uninteresting) one indeed, for right now the airport is fascinating in that there is so much variety. This will slowly go away as people start to look more and more the same. There will then come a point when people will be perfect in every way.
At the present time, looks mean a lot in our society and definitely give you an edge over others. Studies have shown that beautiful women and handsome men are automatically assumed to be 'better' and are given preferential treatment while those not so good looking have it harder. No surprise there. Need I mention skin color and the advantage that brings? But, that depends on what culture you're in. You're not gonna make it in Japan if you're a tall white guy just as much as you're not going to fit in in the Middle East if you don't have Arab looks.
Getting back to the not so beautiful people, which is most of us to some degree, these ones amaze me because they have to try harder to make it in a world that greatly favors looks. I have determined that there are only two kinds of people when it comes to dealing with this challenge. There are those who don't look very good and go around trying to hide it, and there are those who go around and own their 'affliction', their 'deformity'. In my estimation those latter ones are the ones who handle this issue correctly. They act powerful and confident, proud of the fact that they are unique.
They realize it’s not their beauty that sets them apart, it's their scar, or limp, or hooked nose. Something I saw of great interest the other day was a whole family that had near unibrows like Frida Kahlo, the artist. The gauntlet of great confrontation had definitely been thrown to these ones.
This genetic anomaly had been passed to the kids through the mother, who had a pronounced near unibrow. The father's influence had softened the trait somewhat but the kids still had near unibrows to varying degrees. Mom had dealt with it all of her life, how her kids were to handle the hand they’d been dealt remained to be seen. These kinds of weird, family-specific issues are going to go away in the future because you know most people, given a choice, are going to have 'unibrows-being-passed-down-to-their-kids' as the first item on their Trait Alterations List when they go to visit their pre-birth 'Geneticist', who will be a very in-demand specialist of the future. So many changes to be made!
…your body will just naturally turn out this way!
Igor Starkov- Unsplash.com
Brown eyes, super common now, will be a thing of the past. Black straight hair. Short bodies. Big, protruding ears. Skin color! That's a big one. Skin tone will be adjusted so people will have permanent tans. Bodies will probably become taller, as height is advantageous. Nearsightedness and the need for glasses will be eliminated. Less facial and/or body hair will get a yes. Also being altered in some way will be inner traits, such as intelligence, health, fertility, stamina, etc.
It's going to be a very different world.
For now, I (and you) can enjoy the passing parade but in the future.....
....it's gonna be boring, man. People living then in their perfect bodies will look upon us as if we were circus freaks and wonder how we dealt with what must have been almost unbearable amounts of rejection. There will be books written about us and studies will have been made of how once the human race was a sea of mutts with only a few purebreds scattered in here and there.
The biggest challenges of the future might be in choosing which clothes to wear in addition to having to determine other people's character, education, or skill level because simply looking good isn't going to be automatically getting you (or them) into any clubs. Social interactions not being based on looks? Sounds confusing already!