•The proposed descriptor is a new descriptor, exploring asymmetry of a facial image.•The proposed descriptor effectively encodes pixels eight bits only.•CSQP shows consistent improvements in recognition and retrieval frameworks.•The performance of the proposed descriptor is better in uncontrolled environment. Facial features are defined as the local relationships that exist amongst the pixels of a facial image. Hand-crafted descriptors identify the relationships of the pixels in the local neighborhood defined by the kernel. Kernel is a two dimensional matrix which is moved across the facial image. Distinctive information captured by the kernel with limited number of pixel achieves satisfactory recognition and retrieval accuracies on facial images taken under constrained environment (controlled variations in light, pose, expressions, and background). To achieve similar accuracies under unconstrained environment local neighborhood has to be increased, in order to encode more pixels. Increasing local neighborhood also increases the feature length of the descriptor. In this paper we propose a hand-crafted descriptor namely Centre Symmetric Quadruple Pattern (CSQP), which is structurally symmetric and encodes the facial asymmetry in quadruple space. The proposed descriptor efficiently encodes larger neighborhood with optimal number of binary bits. It has been shown using average entropy, computed over feature images encoded with the proposed descriptor, that the CSQP captures more meaningful information as compared to state of the art descriptors. The retrieval and recognition accuracies of the proposed descriptor has been compared with state of the art hand-crafted descriptors (CSLBP, CSLTP, LDP, LBP, SLBP and LDGP) on bench mark databases namely; LFW, Color-FERET, and CASIA-face-v5. Result analysis shows that the proposed descriptor performs well under controlled as well as uncontrolled variations in pose, illumination, background and expressions.