The formula for facial beauty

Julie held up the photo at the top of this Times story at the breakfast table this morning. "Which of these women is the more beautiful?" she asked.

"The one on the right, I guess," I said. "But the one on the left is more interesting." (What I didn't say: Were I unmarried, I'd ask the one on the left out.)

Julie pointed out that they were the same woman, but the one I'd picked out as more beautiful was the woman on the left after her facial image had been altered according to a computer program that can change a face to fit what most people classify as beautiful. It turns out that beauty is not really in the eye of the beholder. Excerpt:

Studies have shown that there is surprising agreement about what makes a face attractive. Symmetry is at the core, along with youthfulness; clarity or smoothness of skin; and vivid color, say, in the eyes and hair. There is little dissent among people of different cultures, ethnicities, races, ages and gender.

Yet, like the many other attempts to use objective principles or even mathematical formulas to define beauty, this software program raises what psychologists, philosophers and feminists say are complex, even disturbing, questions about the perception of beauty and a beauty ideal.

To what extent is beauty quantifiable? Does a supposedly scientific definition merely reflect the ideal of the moment, built from the images of pop culture and the news media?

"How can they prove it?" said Lois W. Banner, a historian who has studied changing beauty standards, referring to scientific efforts to define attractiveness. "They are never going to locate it on a gene. They are never going to get away from the cultural influence."

Well, maybe -- and this slideshow accompanying the article shows how "perfection" actually makes some people look more bland -- but as Jonathan Hale reminded us in "The Old Way of Seeing," his book about architecture, there are recurring patterns in nature that we seem to be evolutionarily hard-wired to recognize as beautiful and harmonious. That's why the kind of traditional architecture that people love (versus most Modernist architecture) can vary widely across cultures, but still be cherished: because it repeats the same basic natural patterns.

If it's true about architectural beauty, why isn't it true about the architecture of faces? The computer programmers behind the "beautification engine" believe it is. The difference, I think, is that faces express character. It would be silly to pretend that facial beauty is entirely subjective, but I find looking at most fashion models to be very boring, even though I acknowledge them to be beautiful. There is a difference, isn't there, between beautiful and attractive.