How to know, once and for all, that you are hideous.

The image to the left is a beautiful face. Now, you may not think so just by looking at it, but that series of lines is the exact proportions that, regardless of race or culture, determine whether or not you will be viewed as attractive. I came across it when I was watching a BBC mini-series called The Human Face, starring John Cleese. If you don't know who Cleese is, well, your mother smells of elderberries.

In the episode "Beauty", Cleese interviews Dr. Stephen Marquardt. His website can be found here. Dr. Marquardt is a surgeon who wanted to know what made people beautiful. Eventually his work lead him to create the above image which is based on the Golden Ratio.

The Golden Ratio was pioneered by ancient Greek mathematicians like Pythagoras and Euclids, and has been with us ever since. These whiz kids realized that nature, beauty itself, adhered to a specific patten. That pattern can be expressed as 1:1.618. In the example of the face, the width of the nose at the base is 1 and the width of the mouth, in relation, is 1.618. In turn, the width of the mouth could be the 1 and the length from the mouth to the edge of the cheek could be the 1.618 and so on. When looking at the length of the entire human body, the distance from feet to navel and from navel to forehead will also adhere to this pattern in a well proportioned person. A star or pentagram is beautiful to us because it is composed of intersecting isosceles triangles which correspond to one another and whose individual sides are dictated by the ratio.

I could go on and on about all the places you can find the golden mean in nature and design, but my purpose here today is less academic and far more narcissistic. I wanted to see how I myself stacked up against the mean.

This dashing young gent is yours truly. Ladies, please keep the swooning to a minimum as this is a very serious matter of science.

Using the free image manipulation program Gimp, I turned the Marquadt face into a transparency and laid it on top of mine. Notably, the right side of my face in the image is better proportioned than the left. Having suffered from a lazy eye in my younger years, I find this unsurprising as symmetry is often an indicator of health and proper growth. The lack of symmetry goes some ways towards explaining my eye problems.

On the right side of my face, the eye aligns well while my cheekbone and jawline contour to the appropriate lines. The lips also adhere well to their lines as does the nose, though it is a bit large.

Now this is better. By copying and flipping the right side of my face, we can create a more balanced look. What is interesting here is that even if my face were properly balanced, there are still some issues. We can now see even more clearly that the nose is spilling outside of its lines and that the eyes are not wide enough. Additionally, the eyebrows are too low on the face and give off, along with the eyes, a "closed-off" appearance and may even signal aggression.

Perhaps this explains why people always ask me "Are you having a good time" or say "You don't look like you had much fun." I was having fun until you reminded me that I look like the bastard child of Eeyore the Donkey and Ebenezer Scrooge, you fuck.

Ahem. If you would like to try this for yourself, you can download Gimp here and the line version of the face here.

Create two layers in gimp, both with transparency. Place your face on the bottom layer and the line face on the top layer, then resize your face until the lips and jawline match up. And then, hey presto: mathematical proof that no one will ever love you.

P. S. For you nerds out there, be sure to check out fractals and the fibonacci sequence to learn more about the fascinating patterns that lie just beneath the veil of the cosmos.