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| The Golden Ratios For Female Facial Beauty |
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| SciMed - Soc & Psych | |||
| TS-Si News Service | |||
| Thursday, 17 December 2009 09:00 | |||
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Toronto, Ont, Canada, USA. Being average may be golden for young caucasian women. For them, the distance between a woman's eyes and the distance between her eyes and her mouth are key factors in determining how attractive she is to others, according to new psychology research. Researchers tested the existence of an ideal facial feature arrangement. They successfully identified the optimal relation between the eyes, the mouth and the edge of the face for individual beauty, but further studies are needed to know whether there is a different set of golden ratios for male faces and for faces from other races or for children's faces. In four separate experiments, the researchers asked university students to make paired comparisons of attractiveness between female faces with identical facial features but different eye-mouth distances and different distances between the eyes. The investigators were Pamela Pallett and Stephen Link of the University of California, San Diego, and Kang Lee of the University of Toronto. Their research findings are published by the journal Vision Research. They discovered two golden ratios, one for length and one for width. Female faces were judged more attractive when:
Interestingly, these proportions correspond with those of an average face. "People have tried and failed to find these ratios since antiquity. The ancient Greeks found what they believed was a golden ratio – also known as phi or the divine proportion – and used it in their architecture and art. Some even suggest that Leonardo Da Vinci used the golden ratio when painting his Mona Lisa. But there was never any proof that the golden ratio was special. As it turns out, it isn't. Instead of phi, we showed that average distances between the eyes, mouth and face contour form the true golden ratios," said Pallett, a post-doctoral fellow in psychology at UC San Diego and also an alumna of the department. "We already know that different facial features make a female face attractive – large eyes, for example, or full lips," said Lee, a professor at University of Toronto and the director of the Institute of Child Study at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. "Our study conclusively proves that the structure of faces – the relation between our face contour and the eyes, mouth and nose – also contributes to our perception of facial attractiveness. Our finding also explains why sometimes an attractive person looks unattractive or vice versa after a haircut, because hairdos change the ratios." The researchers suggest that the perception of facial attractiveness is a result of a cognitive averaging process by which people take in all the faces they see and average them to get an ideal width ratio and an ideal length ratio. They also posit that "averageness" (like symmetry) is a proxy for health, and that we may be predisposed by biology and evolution to find average faces attractive. FundingThe research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the American Psychological Association.
CitationNew golden ratios for facial beauty. Pamela Pallett, Stephen Link, and Kang Lee. Vision Research 2009; rPub ahead of print. doi: 10.1016/j.visres.2009.11.003. ISSN: 1878-5646
Abstract In four experiments, we tested the existence of an ideal facial feature arrangement that could optimize the attractiveness of any face given its facial features. Participants made paired comparisons of attractiveness between faces with identical facial features but different eye–mouth distances and different interocular distances. We found that although different faces have varying attractiveness, individual attractiveness is optimized when the face’s vertical distance between the eyes and the mouth is approximately 36% of its length, and the horizontal distance between the eyes is approximately 46% of the face’s width. These “new” golden ratios match those of an average face. Keywords: face perception, visual perception, psychophysics.
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