Forget the Mirror Test: A Surgeon's Case for Faces That Hold Together

After examining 100,000 faces over a career, one plastic surgeon has settled on a distinction that's simple to state and harder to measure. A symmetrical face is one whose two halves match. A coherent face is one whose features make sense as a whole, and that's what the surgeon now values more. For readers who watch a red carpet from Beverly Hills to New York with an archivist's eye, it's a useful idea to borrow: the matching is the arithmetic, and the agreement among the features is the effect.

With reporting from Elle.