14 DAY TRIAL // A true beauty is not the woman who stands out from the crowd, as we might have believed until now, researchers from UC San Diego and the University of Toronto have learned, as NBC San Diego informs. Attractiveness, and therefore what we perceive as “beautiful” about a woman, is to be found in a golden ratio of distances, meaning from eyes to mouth and between the eyes.
Conducted by UCSD’s Pamela Pallett, the study set out to establish whether what the Greeks held as “golden ratio” for a woman’s beauty still applied. In order to do that, they had study participants look at numerous photographs and then rate the beauty of the women in them. As it turns out, the perfect face is also what we know as the “girl next door” face, which might seem average at first sight, but which is actually precisely what we perceive as “stunning.”
“The researchers say the identified the ‘golden ratios’ – the optimal relation between the eyes, the mouth and the edge of the face for individual beauty. Women were judged to be more attractive when the vertical distance between eyes and mouth was about 36 percent of the face’s length, and the optimal distance between the eyes was judged to be 46 percent of the face’s width,” the aforementioned media outlet says. Megan Fox (pictured), Jessica Alba, Penelope Cruz and Shania Twain are among the celebrities who fit this profile, it is also being said.
“The ancient Greeks found what they believed was a ‘golden ratio’ and used it in their architecture and art,” psychologist Pamela Pallett explains. However, this ratio can be easily changed with minor “tweaks” like getting a new haircut, study author Prof Kang Lee of the University of Toronto, also points out. “Our findings also explain why an attractive person sometimes looks unattractive after a haircut – or vice versa – because hairdos change the ratios,” Lee says.
Of course, the findings of the study don’t change the fact that certain things, like very large eyes or a fuller set of lips, can – and do – contribute more to a woman’s attractiveness that this set of perfect proportions, as exemplified above.