Beauty: Who Measures Up?

Believe it or not, many scientists think that we have a biological preference for symmetry. Studies show that even as babies, we prefer gazing at people with even features.

For the birds, you say? You're right! Animals, such as birds, show the same preference. When researchers clipped the tails of male swallows to make them asymmetrical, female swallows proved far less amorous. There is some kind of natural beauty, it seems, in balance.

But could a more precise equation for beauty exist? The Greeks thought so. Plato, under the influence of Pythagoras, believed that beauty, architectural and otherwise, was expressed by a mathematical formula called the Golden Section. The formula demanded that the ratio of the shorter part of a given unit to the longer part equal the ratio of the longer part to the whole. And this perfect ratio boils down to 1:1.61803 (about the length of your hand relative to the length of your forearm).

Phidias, Greece's most acclaimed sculptor, applied the Golden Section to his statues of the gods, with divine results. In 1509, Leonardo da Vinci's close chum, the mathematician Luca Pacioli, wrote a three-volume book called De Divina Proportione, which argued that the equation was the cornerstone of all aesthetic endeavor. Some art scholars even believe that Leonardo's Mona Lisa conforms to a version of the formula called the Golden Rectangle.

The 1:1.61803 ratio refuses to go away. In the 1860s, German psychologist Gustav Theodor Fechner put ten rectangles varying in their length-to-width ratios in front of people and asked them to select the most pleasing one. Guess which rectangles ruled? In 1994, a London-based orthodontist updated the experiment, measuring the faces of fashion models. He determined that they satisfied the Greeks' perfect ratio far more closely than the average face.

The latest, most user-friendly incarnation of the theory belongs to retired plastic surgeon Stephen Marquardt. He's devised a mask for applying the Greeks' Golden Section to the face. The closer your features conform to the lines of the mask, the prettier your face, supposedly. As you might imagine, supermodels like Cindy Crawford and Linda Evangelista fit gorgeously. Other folks don't fare so well.

Science is divided over the idea of the Golden Section. Many researchers have shown that people asked to choose "beautiful" faces from photos preferred composites of average faces, regardless of their mathematical ratio. But even in these studies, people consistently prefer certain characteristics: higher cheek bones, a thinner jaw, and large, wide eyes--the very features that cosmetic surgeons now make more and more bucks to create. Yep, there's gold in beauty somehow.

Renaissance

In the 15th century, upper-class ladies of northern Europe painfully plucked their hairline to make their foreheads seem higher, and scraped their hair back under an elaborate headdress. In the warmer climate of Italy, women displayed their hair in plaits and under low, jeweled turbans or caps. Blond hair was considered to be a sign of beauty and high class. As a result, both men and women attempted to turn their hair blond by using bleach, saffron or onion skin dye, or, in the case of Italian women, by sitting for hours in a crownless hat in the sun.

From: KnowledgeNews