Do you ever wonder what it is about the faces of really attractive people that make them, well, so attractive? Turns out science is interested in figuring out that conundrum as well; and writer Chip Rowe decided to delve into the research and use it to analyze his own mug.
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He admits his face isn’t “for everyone,” but still judges himself to be “not unattractive,” underlining the fact that studies suggest we tend to see ourselves as better looking that we actually are:
My bulbous nose drifts to the right, and my chin is a bit weak, although it’s skillfully hidden behind a goatee. It’s more difficult to hide the bags under my eyes or the fact I have lost most of my hair, which probably kept me from a career in television. And a few months ago, after more than four decades of checking the mirror daily for zits, I noticed that my right ear lobe is shorter than my left. How do you miss something like that?
According to the data, everybody loves symmetrical faces and they tend to gravitate towards the ones whose measurements are closest to the mathematical average of features. But while average makes for an attractive face, it’s the slightly exaggerated feature (think Brigitte Bardot’s plump lips and Angelina Jolie’s ski-slope cheekbones) that makes the difference between “beautiful” and “strikingly beautiful.”
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Rowe turned to Tommer Leyvand, one of a team of Israeli scientists who developed software for “digital face beautification” to beautify his own face. To create the software, Leyvand’s team used research done by another group, in which 68 men and women, ages 25 to 40, from Israel and Germany, selected the most attractive of 92 female and 33 male faces. From those winning portraits, Leyvand and his colleagues measured 84 points on each face to create an artificial intelligence that consistently rated attractiveness similarly to the average human rater. However, the researchers wanted to ensure their program didn’t change a person’s face so much that it was no longer recognizable. So the software moves your facial features in small increments toward the “beauty-weighted average” of the “nearest neighbors of that face”—pretty people whose features look sort of like yours—rather than lurching toward some universal ideal.
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The software created a “beautified” version of Rowe’s face: it’s narrower, with raised eyebrows and eyes, more space above his upper lip, and a trimmer nose shifted slightly to the right.
And it’s not like I was unhappy with the old visage. Actually I was, but only when I was much younger and wished I was better looking so the women I loved would love me back. This concerns me far less as I approach 50, married, my testosterone dropping, and three children to carry forward my DNA. Whatever looks I managed as a younger man that weren’t extinguished by corduroy and the physique of a twig have served me well enough.
He calls his new face “more East Coast than Midwest” and more open to adventure and confident at clubs. But his honest opinion was that the new look made him seem emaciated. He ended up preferring the face he has now. A similar reaction was found among the research subjects. While they found the new looks more attractive, most of the subjects preferred the original form.
Curated article from:
Nautilus
