Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Head Shop >

Proportions of Beauty?

Frances Farmer

20:13 / 12.10.01

I recall a little while back, one of these educational television channels (Discovery?) doing a special as regards scientific analysis of beauty. I didn't see the special, but I was intrigued by a particular commercial, wherein they pose the question: "What does the number 1.618 have to do with the perfect face?".

As I'm sure many know, 1.618, or 1:1.618, is a ratio described both by the golden section/golden mean, and the fibonacci sequence (1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34..).

It's interesting, however, to see a study polling individuals (That's how they determined that the number had aesthetic signifiance) on features they found attractive demonstrating a commonality: the spacing of facial entities (nose, mouth, eyes, jowls, etc) in accordance with the ratio 1:1.618 was almost always considered pleasing. This could credit the number, oft appreciated by Pythogoras and the like, with some sort of automatic, sub-neural, unconcious significance.

So, without further ado...

Who cares to conjecture?

20:33 / 12.10.01

I remember watching that and found it very interesting. I'm very intrigued by the idea that our whole attraction to the oppositte sex really may be based entirely on looks. At first, I refuted the idea. I believed that looks weren't everything. But after analyzing some girls I liked and finding that their traits very closely resembled those described in the documentary, I was forced to admit that even I was 'shallow' in some sense. I now believe that in our first impression of a person, we decide whether we like them or not based on how they look. Later on, as we get to know the other person, we fill in the gaps we've created. If I originally find someone attracted, I look for things in them that support attraction. This may be why love is often blind. It's really because we don't look for the bad traits in the people we're physically attracted too. Usually unless the person is a total arse do we come to our senses and realize that looks are everything. However, good-looking people, while sometimes vainer, are still usually happier because they look good and looks matter in our society. Attractive, handsome, people have better chances of success in jobs, relationships, etc than other people. I still believe in love, though I feel that part of it is still totally physical, but we may only acknowledge this subconciously. In the end, in a serious relationship, it's still what's on the inside that counts. However, I think we should be aware of our own subtle, instinctual assumptions of other people based on their looks because we do make them. Sad but true. That's my cheap $.02

reidcourchie

20:53 / 12.10.01

I'm not sure about this. I've not considered this scientifically but I've only ever gone out with women I think are devastatingly attractive, as I feel it would be insane to go out with someone you don't feel attracted to.

However I have been involved wth attractive girls who I have found vering boring for one reason or another. I think I'm able to tell if someone is attractive regardless of wether I find them interesting.

What I wonder is, why do they go out with me as I am very, very ugly. I suppose they're not as shallow as I.

22:19 / 12.10.01

quote:Originally posted by reidcourchie:
What I wonder is, why do they go out with me as I am very, very ugly. I suppose they're not as shallow as I.

Because you ask.

Frances Farmer

01:46 / 13.10.01

What are your opinions on the idea that anything proportioned to the 1:1.618 ratio is somehow pleasing, and perhaps recognized by the subconcious?

I've always found the number interesting. It appears consistantly. The same ratio, I believe, is responsible for the rate at which a Nautilus shell widens in an outward spiral.

It's the divine proportion.

I guess there's a lot of historical precedent for this, but it still has a decidedly fascinating quality.

10:18 / 13.10.01

I'm interested in whether this relates to our visual system. A massive amount of preprocessing is done by the visual cortext, to such an extent that what is presented to our conscious mind is largely constructed. There are layers of neurons that fire in response to certain patterns - for instance, lines at specific angles. Our vision systems are primed to pick out certain patterns - faces, fast moving objects, etc. It could be that the golden mean is hardwired at a very low level.

[ 13-10-2001: Message edited by: Wheaty Goodness ]

02:31 / 14.10.01

I think that the ratio between our iris and pupil (I think these are the right parts) is also the golden ratio. Maybe somehow our eyes do less work or it's easier for them to view things in that ratio, ergo the saying 'sight for sore eyes'. For example, reading white text on a yellow background is 'ugly' for most, the proportion probably works the same way. Also, I wonder about people's mental picture of others. Sometimes after looking at myself or another person for awhile, their features seem to change slightly. I wonder if it's from staring too long or if it's because I'm seeing them for what they really are. What if our eyes are actually flawed and the world around us 'looks' totally different but we'll never know because instruments we may use to 'see' the world are still seen by the eyes or interpreted by our viewing senses so we still may get a tinted window into the world. Any thoughts on this?

02:31 / 14.10.01

quote:Originally posted by LokiTheBoyGenius:
What if our eyes are actually flawed and the world around us 'looks' totally different but we'll never know because instruments we may use to 'see' the world are still seen by the eyes or interpreted by our viewing senses so we still may get a tinted window into the world. Any thoughts on this?

Interesting questions. To me, the verb 'to look' refers specifically to the human (or similar animal's) vision system - what something 'looks' like only has meaning in this context. I see it implying two acts - detection & interpretation.

We could construct an electronic system to 'look', but for it to understand what it saw, I think we would have to model a similar vision system to ours, which would be subject to the same restrictions.

There is no absolute - what hits our eyes is the refelection off matter of a narrow spectrum of electomagnetic radiation. Matter itself consists mostly of emptyness, filled by fields of force. What we 'see' is only our interpretation of these reflections - is it meaningful to say that an electron or an atom 'looks' like anything?

The reflected radiation is picked up by detectors in our retina, which like all detectors are not perfect - their properties have an effect on the signal. The raw data is then processed through layers of neurons. What is finally presented to our conciousness is not a matrix of pixels, but a high level construction - a reality created in our visual cortex.

Another question - is there an aural version of the golden mean?

[ 14-10-2001: Message edited by: Wheaty Goodness ]

11:58 / 14.10.01

Lots of these seemingly arbitrary constants in our universe- they crop up all the time in theoretical physics, maths, ooo, loads of places.

Examples: pi: planck's constant: the Feignbaum number.

Just got done reading The Collapse of Chaos in which they have a rather interesting take on this kind of thing. Basically they argue that the 'universality' of these constants is more or less tied to our consistency in applying methods of analysis to different situations. That is to say, the apparent universality arises out of the observation process rather than the object.

An example would be the golden mean arising in a straight line in a painting and again in the relationship between two circles. With the circles, it's present in one form in the relationships between the diameters and in another form in the relationships between the areas, different again with the circumferences, etc.

The business about it being pleasing is key here- there's lots of unpleasing stuff in the universe. So, hardwired into human consciousness-maybe. The universe? Impossible to know.

As for an aural golden mean- maths and music are very nearly the same discipline, except you can't dance to maths.

13:36 / 15.10.01

I can’t speculate on why the golden mean is the ratio that emerges, but I’m not at all surprised that the subjective perception of human beauty can be mapped to a mathematical constant. We’ve known for some time that in every human culture surveyed, symmetrical facial features are considered more attractive than irregular ones. This is probably an adaptive trait, as asymmetrical features are good predictors of genetic disorders and developmental problems.

Back in the 1800s, a man named Galton discovered that if you combined the photographs of several women in a procedure similar to morphing, the resulting composite would be considered more attractive by more people (men and women) than any of the source photographs. So it seems that human beauty is a golden mean in more than one sense--unsurprisingly, the average person prefers the average.