Perfect beauty

It’s not all a matter of taste-and that’s official. But we may not be nearer to learning just what beauty really is.

We all recognize beauty when we see it, but what makes a beautiful face is something that few can agree on. The most controversial finding in some research carried out by Dr Alfred Linney of University College Hospital is that there is no such thing as the beautiful face. Instead, Linney has found that the features of most top fashion models are just as varied as those of everyone else. ‘Some have teeth that stick out, some have a long face, and others a jutting chin. There is no one ideal of beauty that they are all a bit closer to,’ he says.

One of Linney’s co-workers, orthodontist Mark Lowey, even considered that some of the models’ features might have required surgery if found on a ‘normal’ face. ‘One type of problem people often seek help for is teeth that stick out,’ he says.’ One of the models has teeth that stick out eight millimeters and she still looks lovely.’

Recent findings from UCH go against one of the most influential scientific ideas of beauty-that the combination of the features of several ordinary faces can result in one beautiful face. The theory dates back to the last century and is the work of Sir Francis Galton, who made his name both as a psychologist and geneticist. In 1878 he discovered that if photographs of a number of faces were put on top of each other, most people considered the resulting face to be more beautiful than the faces which made them.

But this theory has taken a knock in a recent report from the science magazine Nature. Dr David Perrett, of the University of St Andrews, combined some photographs of both European and Japanese faces and asked people to judge them. ‘We found that not only were individual attractive faces preferred to the combined ones, but that when we used the computer to emphasise the combined features away from the average, that too was preferred,’ he said, This would account for the popularity of actresses such as Brigitte Nielsen and Daryl Hannah, who have features that are far from average.

The research also gives scientific respectability to another old idea. As the philosopher Francis Bacon put it more than three centuries ago:’ There is no excellent beauty which does not have some strangeness in the proportion.’

Dr David Perrett claims, however, that his beautiful faces had something in common. ‘The more attractive ones had higher cheekbones, a thinner jaw, and larger eyes relative to the size of the face than the average ones did,’ he says. He also found that beauty can go across cultures: the Japanese found the same European faces beautiful as the Europeans did, and vice versa.

According to Dr Judith Langlois of the University of Texas, even three-month-old babies prefer beautiful faces to plainer ones.

Another beauty researcher, Dr Michael Cunningham of Elmrus College, Illinois, has been looking at the effect of individual features in a beautiful face and has discovered that some features may or may not be desirable, depending on what the judge is looking for. When male interviewers are selecting a woman for a job, for instance, arched expressive eyebrows and dilated pupils are seen as desirable. On the other hand, men looking for a partner with a view to settling down and starting a family, found a wide smile more important than aggressive eyes and eyebrows. Cunningham also found that attractive women with mature features, such as small eyes and a large nose, received more respect. It could be that societies where women have more power and independence idealise women with more mature features,’ he says, ‘while those which value dependent, weak females may prefer baby faces’.

But the search for a better definition of beauty will continue, driven by the billion-pound beauty industry’s desire to find new ways of closing the gap between the actual and the ideal.

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