Modelling and Mathematics

The holiday season is a weird time of the year - you end up watching all sorts of crappy television shows that you wouldn't necessarily end up watching. So, as i was surfing through the channels there was a re-run of 'Extreme Makeover' on. The program takes people with low self esteem (or ugly depending on how you look at it) and transforms them into 'beautiful' people. Bottom line is that they all end up looking the same. White teeth, button nose, big hair, raised cheekbones and the customary inflated chest. Now I don't know about you but does everyone want to look like this? Is the 'porn-star' look really so beautiful? Damn, i may have just lost half of my readers!

That got me thinking about why do the surgeons end up with this template? Is there a formula for what constitutes beauty? A straw poll of women i know (yeah yeah, a short list...so not representative!) suggest its all about facial symmetry. But is that really the case?

So guess what, 0.32 seconds after googling tells me it's already been solved:

The ancient Greeks identified that the key to beauty for all ages, races and sexes is about proportions of symmetry. This was coined 'The divine proportion' or the 'golden ratio' of 1.618 (So they were wrong in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy)

According to the formula, if the width of the face from cheek to cheek is 10 inches (25 centimetres), then the length of the face from the top of the head to the bottom of the chin should be 16.18 inches to be in ideal proportion. If you're keen to see how you measure up, keep in mind that the ratio also applies to:

+ The width of the mouth to the width of the cheek.

+ The width of the nose to the width of the mouth.

Of course I did the measurements on myself...i should be cracking mirrors so i dumped the Greeks

Esquire magazine picked Scarlett Johansson as their “Sexiest Woman Alive,” and if you are wondering what criteria they may have used, i don't know, but she doesn't fit the divine proportions

So I immediately went to models (a natural leap) as generally when you look at models they all actually look different, some have high foreheads (Lily Cole), freckles (Karen Elson) even short legs (Kate Moss) and what about the small eyes and no eyebrows on stunning Alek Wek- its all about quirkiness and being beautiful because of your flaws rather than in spite of them. However they all have (again sample of one) higher cheek bones, a thinner jaw, and larger eyes relative to the size of their faces. That gave me some variables

So here's my effort:

% Beauty = 0.40 x eyes (bigger and brighter the better) + 0.25 x cheekbones (higher natch) + 0.15 x lips (post-rationalised for Angelina Jolie) + 0.1 x chin (we had a conversation about Tracey Thorn last night) + 0.05 x skin (clearer the better) + 0.05 x facial symmetry (just to piss the Greeks off)

In order to get to this i went through the trashy mags in my house (US weekly, Star, Heat etc) and tested my formula, tweaking the coefficients as I went. As you can see by my estimates , its not an exact science either.

DISCLAIMER: Clients reading this....we don't do it this way for you...its much more complex, sophisticated and expensive than that!

So yes readers, we shouldn't all be running to the plastic surgeon.....we all should be sceptical of any formula that says that the same people will seem beautiful to everyone, because that's simply not true.

I got this last line from my mother (RIP) - a truly beautiful and remarkable woman

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder but ugly is seen clear to the bone."

Amen