Beauty Quadrant – The Science Behind Beauty
The face is shaped by the forces in the Beauty Quadrant. Apply them properly and facial beauty is retained from birth to adulthood. Misapply them and beauty is lost. Science tells us that faces become less attractive due to unnatural facial forces.
With these forces, you can cause or lose beauty. The biggest effects occur from birth to adulthood, when the sutures in the skull fuse. Before then, the skull can be nudged and expanded by the forces that occur at each suture.
Let’s take a look at each tenet of the Beauty Quadrant and the science that highlights dangers with each.
Mouth Posture
The biggest factor in losing beauty is unnatural mouth posture. Natural mouth posture (sometimes called Mewing) goes hand-in-hand with the first tenet of the Health Quadrant – Breathing. When the mouth is open, oftentimes because people mouth breathe, the face grows and develops in less beautiful ways.
Keep your mouth open and the face grows longer and narrower.1
The front of the face gets longer. The jaws don’t grow forwards enough. The palate in the mouth becomes vaulted. The teeth become crooked. The jaws don’t align with each other. All of this can be stopped by adopting natural mouth posture.
How to Eat
The science on the strength and size of the chewing muscles, and how that affects the shape of faces, is clear. All very young children have similar strength and sized masseter muscles. Those who use those muscles well grow to have faces with better proportions. Those whose muscles become weaker grow to have longer faces.
Long-face individuals have significantly weaker biting, chewing and swallowing forces than people with normal face height.2 Having a dominant chewing side also causes asymmetry.3
A factor that no one discusses is the use of cutlery. This has caused overbites to appear – I.e. the jaws become misaligned. This was first spotted by Charles Loring Brace IV. He noted that when China started using chopsticks, overbites became common. In the Western world, cutlery wasn’t used until some 800 years after chopsticks. And overbites only became common after knives and forks became popular.
Long faces grow forwards less. This causes wisdom teeth to be impacted, teeth to be crooked and braces and tooth extractions to be necessary. The forces that affect this are mouth posture, how you eat and how you swallow.
Swallowing
Abnormal swallowing patterns affect facial growth negatively. The primary force of swallowing (and of mouth posture) – the tongue – should power a swallow. When someone habitually has an open mouth, they rely on using the cheeks and lips to assist with swallowing. This causes problems.
Longface children typically have ear problems. Research highlights that this is due to improper swallowing, with the tongue not pressed against the palate.4
The airway also remodels when a tongue is weak and mispositioned. Have bad mouth posture and weak swallowing, and your hearing, breathing5 and facial growth are compromised.
Body Posture
The difference in angle between the upper spine and head position has been shown to cause differences in facial development. Research shows that a large craniocervical angle causes vertical facial growth. A smaller angle causes horizontal forwards growth.6
Other research suggests that head and neck posture are closely associated with the growth direction of the face.7
Yet more research has found that if you have unnatural body posture, you are likely to have malocclusions and breathing issues.8 (Breathing is the first Health Quadrant tenet.)
Next Steps…
The science suggests that beauty is not a genetic fluke. It’s based on the Beauty Quadrant. And the way we hold ourselves and the forces our faces endure either help to retain our natural-born beauty, or lose it.
To learn exactly which habits and practices matter, order Beauty Potential: How Facial Beauty is Retained or Lost now.
