Transcription
Over the past few decades, many theories have looked at external facial landmarks to define beauty. There have also been theories that state that an observer focuses on specific parts of the face to judge so. However, all of these theories are flawed precisely because they concentrate on shapes and points that don't hold much significance in the eyes of the observer.
Although looking at just external landmarks is one place to start when analyzing beauty, there are many other methods that look at things holistically and then tie them all together rather than just analyzing facial features piece by piece. One example would be neoclassical canons of beauty, most of which would develop during the Renaissance, mainly by DaVinci, based on early Greek understandings of aesthetics. These guidelines became the standard during the 19th to 17th century as artistic anatomists relied on them heavily in their depiction of faces.
While many artists still rely on classical beauty proportions and these ideals to quickly and accurately produce a repeatable face, plastic surgeons have the much more difficult job of working with what they have—often faces from different races and ethnicities. These ancient ideals are, however, ethnocentric and do not account for the facial differences of other regions. In fact, as we'll see in a second, they're not very good indicators for the people that they were meant to represent either, instead producing one type of prototypical face which may or may not be the most attractive in actuality.
These proportions are not a binary system of attractive versus unattractive—being this face, for example, versus this is not a 0 versus a 10 in terms of looks. Rather, if this was determined to be the most attractive face for that particular ethnic group, then the amount of deviation from this prototypical face will drop your attraction incrementally. But just because you're not the perfect face doesn't put you at a zero. This concept of anthropometric deviation is important to keep in mind for this video and when talking about proportions in general.
Farkas, in 1985, with colleagues, aimed to tackle eight neoclassical canons that these Renaissance artists were particularly fond of, to revise them for a greater range of acceptable variation to the mainstream audience. It's understood that an attractive face has perfect facial thirds, but as we see here, zero percent of the participants in this test paper had these proportions, instead being more bottom-heavy with a larger lower third and forehead. We see this trend with the remaining seven neoclassical guidelines where very few participants actually fit the canon guidelines.
It's important to understand what these guidelines are suggesting but not to follow them blindly. Some faces can have a larger lower third naturally, or it could be due to gender facial deformity such as vertical skeletal dysplasia, aka horse face. Some faces can have a larger upper third because of a recessed hairline. Both of these would be flaws that the average person, or even an orthodontist in the former example, would want corrected to restore better proportion. Just because the study suggests that zero percent of the participants fit those neoclassical guidelines doesn't make them invalid, which is where understanding the data and having experience with potential flaws is very important. That's exactly why the COOS brand exists—to educate our audiences into thinking critically.
In our aesthetic reports, we use the neoclassical facial thirds as a guideline, and then our orthodontic team or the dental team evaluates the face for potential dysplasia or misalignment to understand if the deviation from perfect facial thirds is a natural variation, such as here, or an underlying issue that affects other facial features too. You can download a free sample report over at the COOS website and see for yourself.
Just like with proportion, there's a similar misconception about averageness. To be truly attractive, it's not enough to be just coinophilic in the sense that your features resemble that of a composite image made from many different faces. We use this as a benchmark in analysis because an average face is one that is free from cosmetic or dental facial flaws and then assess deviations from that first. This helps bring a client's face to a quote-unquote "blank slate" by quickly identifying and correcting their most deviant flaws from the average prototype. The average face would then be a 7 out of 10 in attractiveness, and it's funny that when asked to rate themselves, most people say that they are a 7, even though by definition everyone cannot be a 7. That's because a face that is a 5 has a lot of flaws, and research has shown that we see ourselves more like this average face and ignore a lot of the flaws. We touched on this in our episode on mirror reflections. A truly attractive face that is a 9 or a 10 actually has features that are away from the average, and this was shown in Johnston and colleagues' paper where certain non-average traits, such as increased lip fullness and shorter chin length, were deemed more attractive on women.
There is, however, another way to assess faces that very few people know of. Multiple studies have looked at the concept of the circles of prominence, which could possibly explain the ideal aesthetic values of the face. A person, when asked to position a circle within a box, would most likely place the circle in the center of the box. The same could be true for the face: the iris, nasal tip, lower lip could be thought of as a circle, while the face can be considered as the box. This follows the idea that beauty is limited by what our minds can interpret from a physiological level. A person might be attractive in infrared light, but unless you're a vampire bat, you can't see infrared—only visible light, and the way you process that determines how you view beauty. We identify faces by subtle gradations in light that helps us see depth. Ganglion cells in the retina are arranged in circles, and so stimulation is greatest between circular borders of light and dark, and more often than not, we immediately look into the eyes of a person rather than focusing on their ears, for instance. Studies on eye movement have recorded, in specific, that we focus on the eyes, nose, and mouth, then other landmarks, but return back to these features.
In the past, we've also discussed the central face theory, where features towards the center of the face get more attention and thus are more sensitive for attraction than those laterally outwards. If we combine these two ideas, the circle of prominence theory suggests that the ideal proportion of a particular face is determined by iris width because we focus on the iris so much, and everything else is reduced to peripheral vision. In this example, the inner circles are all one iris width apart, which is similar in proportion to most standard guidelines on aesthetics. The authors state that the smaller the facial structures are from one iris width proportion, the less association they have with other structures—in other words, less harmony.
The circle of prominence hypothesis also theorizes that the position of the iris can pinpoint the ideal positions of other aspects of the face. In these figures, Young examined the ideal eyebrow height and hypothesized that the ideal distance would be one iris width. This theory was found to be statistically correct in both line drawings and morphed pictures. The group studied by Young had shifting opinions where initially they preferred a slightly higher brow position at one and a half iris widths and then later shifting to a half iris width. Young theorized that the shifting opinion could be due to the fact that the lower brow position is more common in the normal population than the higher one. A higher eyebrow position of two iris widths was deemed the worst by the study group, and this may be due to the rare number of people with this type of eyebrow position, and additionally unpleasant emotions such as fear, surprise, or shock are conveyed by a high brow position.
In these figures, Young studied the nose to test the prominence hypothesis, stating that the ideal width of the nose bridge and tip should be one iris width in both the line and morph pictures. A smaller nose of half iris width was the second most preferred size of the one and a half iris width size. This supports a lot of other guidelines that we've seen all over the literature that smaller nose sizes are generally better than their bigger counterparts, depending on the ethnic group in regards to rhinoplasty. Although the ideal size would be one iris width, if the choice was between a half or one and a half, it would be much better aesthetically speaking to go with the half iris width size. The researchers also saw a similar trend in regards to the lower lip height where one iris width was selected by the study group as the most ideal in both the line and morphed pictures. This data closely resembled what Young found with the nasal bridge and tip width, with people showing a preference for a smaller lower lip in contrast to a larger lower lip, as the half iris width height of the lower lip was preferred over the one and a half lower lip. Similarly, the ideal height of the upper lip was found to be half of the iris width, whereas the ideal distance of the ear from the side of the face was found to be somewhere between 0.5 and 1 iris width.
One of the biggest issues in surgical augmentation is overfilling syndrome, especially for the lips where excess use of filler leads to an averted disproportionate appearance. Young's paper suggests smaller lips that do not go beyond half iris width for the upper and one iris width for the lower, but this is the average value for the average face. As we know from the beginning of this video, average values help create a blank slate face, but truly attractive faces have slight deviations in the eyes, nose, and lips—coincidentally the most important parts in the circle of prominence theory as well. A one to three millimeter increase in the upper lip height beyond half iris width is actually more beneficial without harming the proportion of the lower lip, making the face more sensual, and this applies to both men and women as shapely lips are an attractive feature on anyone, according to IAI Atal.
To round out the circle of prominence theory (pun most definitely intended), we'll briefly discuss some aesthetic ratios. Young's third paper on the topic found ratios of three iris widths for each physionomical segment to be most aesthetic, with a 4-3-3 ratio coming second—that has a slightly larger mid-face. Going back to Farkas's research on the neoclassical proportions that DaVinci put out, we see that the 3-3-3 ideal represented by the canon guidelines, but you also see 100% of the test population having the opposite of the 4-3-3 ratio of Young's study with a shorter midface and larger jaw. Granted that these are two completely different studies of different time periods, it's interesting to note that what one feature that a test group has is the opposite of what was found to be the most attractive by another test group in another paper. This doesn't throw a wrench into anyone's findings because Farkas's paper wasn't made to discuss aesthetics; it simply challenges some 500-year-old proportion tests and says, "Hey, look, zero percent of the population have these ratios; should we really be using them as a gold standard to strive for?" And Young's paper on the circle of prominence theory is stating the opposite by saying that perfect facial thirds, or at least the bottom two thirds, are very attractive.
What I think is actually going on is that we find perfect facial thirds attractive exactly for this reason: because zero percent of the population has it, or in this case, the test population from Farkas's paper. The one extreme outlier that does have perfect proportion stands out very well. The circle of prominence theory relies on the core tendon of order; an attractive face is just the most well-ordered or harmonious set of features that are distributed across a blank slate of a face. Where should the eyes go? How far apart should the nose be? How high are the brows? Are questions any portrait artists have asked themselves at some point. The fact that most people place their circles in the dead center of the box shows our innate desire for order, and when things aren't balanced or how we expect them to be, we feel deeply unsatisfied or even uncomfortable. The circle of prominence theory accounts for deviations by ethnic groups as it's based on something that is innately yours—the size of your iris, not the size of Miranda Kerr's iris or Hugh Jackman's.
While neoclassical canons can help measure proportion and average faces can help measure, well, averageness or coinophilia, the circle of prominence theory can help measure facial harmony, which is something that is often misunderstood and even more often misapplied. In doing research for this video, we learned so many new things and spoke to so many new people, and I would love to share all of my thoughts on the research, but producing videos is lengthy. That's why we're working on a podcast that will be on our Patreon, and I'll bring guest stars in plastic surgeons and even discuss with some of the COOS staff their thoughts on topics as chosen by you. They'll be opening next week with an announcement. Last but not least, if you want to get your face assessed, perhaps with the circle of prominence theory, order an aesthetics report over at the COOS website.