Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, the saying goes. But actually beauty has been proved to depend on ratio, and is based on mathematical formulas. Scientists have even shown that rather than learnt, the idea of beauty is innate in a newborn infant.
The ideal proportions and the length and width of our nose, mouth, chin, the position of the eyes etc. all form what scientists call the Golden Ratio.
This is the same ratio that has been used by architects and artists throughout history to create famous objects of beauty like Michelangelo's "David" and the Greek temples.
In experiments UK researchers have interestingly shown that newborn babies as young as one day old appears to prefer to look at attractive faces.
Face recognition and attraction to beauty and proportions, researchers at the University of Exeter say, is hardwired at birth, and not learned.
By showing paired images, that had been graded 1-5 in beauty by a broad group of people, they noticed that most babies spent far more time fixated on the more attractive face.
Beauty based on statistical average
Research has found that by melding together hundreds of different images of faces, a statistical average of facial characteristics is reached that is very attractive.
To the baby, pretty faces can therefore be seen as representing the stereotypical human face, which they have evolved to recognise.
The eyes of the beholder may have varied preferences in terms of what is attractive and not, and luckily we don't all look the same.
But even if this research should be taken with a pinch of salt, it looks like we can actually talk of such a thing as beauty as a norm.
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