Tom Cruise, Marilyn Monroe and Michelle Pfeiffer are all beauty icons. They have something that makes us want to look at them.We all know people with beautiful faces but really what is beauty? is there truly a universal definition of beauty? and what is that factor that makes someone beautiful?
According to my oxford dictionary:
Beauty is a combination of qualities that give pleasure to the sight or the senses or to the mind.
The interesting thing is when i knew that there was a science studying this whole concept.
I was introduced to this science through a BBC documentary called "The Human Face" which lead me to the site http://www.beautyanalysis.com/. Most of the information in this entry is based on these two sources.
Apparently British scientists have discovered that human infants are born with an innate concept of what makes an attractive face.
Research at Exeter University has found that newborn babies show a marked preference for people with features that are conventionally judged as handsome by adults.
The findings suggest that ideals of facial beauty are not determined by culture alone, but also rely on universal standards that have been hard-wired, or imprinted, in our genes.
"Attractiveness is not simply in the eye of the beholder, it is in the brains of newborn infants, right from the moment of birth", says Alan Slater, a developmental psychologist who led the study.
To understand this we need to go to back to look at our species. All animals need a way to identify their own species for mating, bonding, self- protection and other survival purposes. The animals usually use one or a combination of their senses like sound, smell and vision.
Humans, on the other hand, are considered visual animals who identify each other by sight. And in our genetic code we have a visual image of the "ideal" human face. It's a subconscious image of what a "human" is supposed to be. The more a face resembles this "Ideal Human Face Image" - the more we perceive it to be human which also sets off in us a conscious response of "attraction" and "positive emotion".
Throughout history many different numbers have been tried in an attempt to describe beauty and one mathematical relationship has been consistently & repeatedly reported to be present in beautiful things. That relationship is called the “Golden ratio” which is the ratio of 1.618 to 1.
An American beauty surgeon and researcher called Stephen Marquardt studied beauty for a very long time and based on the golden ratio he constructed the Beauty mask that is used to measure beautiful faces. I checked the website and i found that the mask is applied to different faces and actually the more the face matches the mask the more beautiful it is. You can check it for yourself.
I find all of this very fascinating because it gives a scientific explanation for such abstract concepts like beauty and attraction.
I recommend watching the video on you tube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AZe9g2Huz0&feature=related
You can also check Stephen Marquardt's website: http://www.beautyanalysis.com/index2_mba.htm
Other recommended readings include: ttp://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article478835.ece
1 comment:
"And in our genetic code we have a visual image of the "ideal" human face. It's a subconscious image of what a "human" is supposed to be." - While I am not qualified to judge the correctness of their claims, isn't it a bit inhumane to say that "ugly" people are less human than others?!
Its kind of self-defeating, they describe beauty as the amount of "humanness", while the judgment itself is more or less inhumane!!
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