‘Golden ratios’ of female beauty found

TORONTO - Beauty is not only in the eye of the beholder, but also in the relationship of the eyes and mouth of the person, according to new research by Canadian and American researchers.

The distance between a woman’s eyes and the distance between her eyes and her mouth determine her attractiveness, say researchers from the University of Toronto and the University of California in San Diego.

In their tests for the existence of an ideal facial feature arrangement, they successfully identified the ‘optimal’ relation between the eyes, the mouth and the edge of the face for individual beauty.

In four separate experiments, the researchers asked university students to make paired comparisons of attractiveness between female faces with identical facial features but different eye-mouth distances and different distances between the eyes, a university statement here said Wednesday.

They discovered two ‘golden ratios’, one for length and one for width. Female faces were judged more attractive when the vertical distance between their eyes and the mouth was approximately 36 percent of the face’s length and the horizontal distance between their eyes was approximately 46 percent of the face’s width, the statement said.

“People have tried and failed to find these ratios since antiquity. The ancient Greeks found what they believed was a ‘golden ratio’ - also known as ‘phi’ or the ‘divine proportion’ - and used it in their architecture and art. Some even suggest that Leonardo Da Vinci used the golden ratio when painting his Mona Lisa,” said researcher Pamela Pallett from UC San Diego.

“But there was never any proof that the golden ratio was special. As it turns out, it isn’t. Instead of phi, we showed that average distances between the eyes, mouth and face contour form the true golden ratios,” she said.

“We already know that different facial features make a female face attractive - large eyes, for example, or full lips,” said Kang Lee of Toronto University.

The Canadian professor added: “Our study conclusively proves that the structure of faces - the relation between our face contour and the eyes, mouth and nose - also contributes to our perception of facial attractiveness.

“Our finding also explains why sometimes an attractive person looks unattractive or vice versa after a haircut, because hairdos change the ratios.”

According to the researchers, the perception of facial attractiveness is a result of a mental averaging process by which people take in all the faces they see and average them to get an ideal width ratio and an ideal length ratio.

Since only white female faces were studied by the researchers, they said further studies are needed to know whether there is a different set of ‘golden ratios’ for male faces and for faces from other races.