2010 is still young and since it's a Friday I had a bit more time than usual this morning to scan through some of the more frivolous posts that manage to find their way into my RSS feed reader. One that caught my attention was this post on Gizmodo titled "Dear Photoshop: Thank you for the prettiest woman in the planet". My first reaction was "There is a woman IN the planet"? - which on a Friday morning is quite an idea to get your head around. But apart from the amusing, and more than likely inadvertent, replacement of 'on' with 'in' the post is actually very interesting.
Basically the idea here is that if you combine the faces of the worlds 16 most "beautiful' women (I don't have to point out that they are all celebrities either) you, theoretically, can find out what the prettiest woman on the planet looks like - an Idea, I'm sure you will admit is intriguing. Above is the result of the experiment - quite disappointment actually as I dont find the final product specially attractive. More than anything, I think the experiment reveals some very interesting things about the perception (and especially Western perception) of beauty.
Never mind the fact that
beauty is entirely subjective in the first place -
my top 16 is going to look very different to yours - the most obvious thing about the experiment is that the 16 women chosen are mostly caucasians; and film stars to boot. This is interesting in the sense that there are definitely
more beautiful women out there than the (admittedly lovely) ladies that make up this experiment's top 16. The reason these women don't make the list is because they are 'unknowns' and
we have a habit of idolising celebrities and elevating their beauty as a result so it's no surprise that they are not represented... it also reveals how much we hold aloft female movie stars.
I also find it interesting that as you go down the list and the faces become more blended together you lose a huge amount of personality that each of these women posses. The end result is
a face that may be aesthetically pleasing but is by no means more attractive than each individual. I would argue that it is this individuality in each face that makes it more appealing. Infact I found some very interesting research around beauty and faces
here. One of the
experiments they ran proved that most people will find an 'average' face more attractive than a face that has more unusual features.
Overall I think the experiment would have been more successful in producing a better result if it included a wider racial profile and not just caucasians. As the experiment stands I see the result as what would happen if you took a group of already idolised women, who are more often than not photoshopped to look better in photos anyway, and forced them to have some sort of airbrushed love child... still a very interesting idea. I wonder what the world's best looking man would look like?
[Image credited to David Keyes]
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