The Perfect Face

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By Linda | December 3, 2008

My 10-year-old science loving son just LOVES a movie called “The Librarian“. As far as movies go, it’s a pretty fair action-adventure flick with some supernatural elements mixed into the storyline. The movie stars Noah Wyle as an introverted professional student that one fateful day interviews for the position of Librarian at a impressive looking institution. The interview seems to go very badly but to his surprise, he is granted the position on a trial basis. As it turns out, this is no ordinary Library. The items in its inventory of historical artifacts include “The Holy Grail” and “The Spear of Destiny”. Adventure ensues, none of it involving the Dewey decimal system.

The reason I bring up The Librarian is that in one scene, our hero tries to charm a girl by telling her that her facial features are perfect because they fit the “Golden Ratio”; a mathematical standard describing the ideal of beauty. When my son asked me if there really was such a thing, I didn’t have an answer.

As it urns out, there is indeed a mathematical formula that describes proportions that are particularly aesthetically pleasing whether they are seen in architechture, sculpture or in a human face! The Golden Ratio, also known as the Divine or Phi Ratio, boils down to this ratio: 1:1.618

Scienceray.com provides an excellent and detailed explanation of the mathmetical formula behind this ratio as well as illustrations and figures that visually demonstrate these proportions.

Dr. Stephen R. Marquardt, attempted to quantify beauty scientifically by developing the Golden Decagon Mask based on the ratio 1:1.618 - The closer various facial features such as length of nose, position of eyes and length of chin correlate to key points on the template, the more aesthetically pleasing the face is. Superimposing these templates on a particular face reveals how close (or far) it is to the mathematical ideal of beauty. The female template is on the left.