December 11, 2005

The beauty code

I was reading yesterday about how beauty--physical attractiveness--of the human face can be modelled by computers. Research found that "average" faces were consistently found to be more attractive. By average faces, they mean mathematically averaged, not common, faces. See here for more. That study only took into account Caucasian faces. That filter on the test sample probably simplified the averaging algorithm. Now, in all seriousness, does this average beauty code hold for a pan-racial beauty contest? No one has researched this yet, and no one can say for sure. All we could assume is that the mathematical average of all the women or all the men in the world would either look quite Asian or look like one of those racially ambiguous anime characters. Now this is really interesting, because today I read in Xinhua about the Miss World Pageant that just concluded this week in China. Miss Ireland won! But look at the above picture--doesn't she look quite Asian? Haha...food for thought. [EDIT: Oops. As Bryan comments, I incorrectly identified Miss World as Miss Ireland. She's really from Reykjavik--Miss Iceland! And with a name like Unnur Birna Vilhjalmsdottir, I'm not sure how I could have been mistaken.]

5 Comments:

At 12/11/2005 04:18:00 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I definitely thought she was Asian before I saw that she was from Ireland.

 
At 12/11/2005 04:20:00 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Not that this changes much, but she's actually from Iceland, not Ireland.

 
At 12/11/2005 06:13:00 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Look up the golden mean/ratio. The most "perfect" and attractive human face is based on this ratio. It has been researched. You just have to find it hehe...ah the math :)

 
At 12/12/2005 08:53:00 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Psh. People are all ugly. End of story.

Only the Mochi are beautiful *-*

 
At 12/12/2005 11:08:00 PM, Blogger Atom Mechanic said...

that's because you're actually an eighth mochi

 

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