Doorfox586

For centuries, scientists have been trying to figure out what beauty is. However, for the past couple of years, all people care about is how to look beautiful without questioning what it really means.

Today's society has this obsession about the beauty and nowadays, it does not matter whether you are a man or a woman. Either way, you will get bombarded with what designers, celebrities, photographers, etc. consider beautiful. For the most part, when one talks about the beauty, one does not mean natural beauty but that fake, plastic one. The one where you have to have the perfect teeth (perfectly aligned, really white) or where your hair must be perfectly straight or if it does have curls, make sure they are not messy. Today, it is not acceptable to go down the street and have a bad hair day because everyone will stare at you. However, while people might be preoccupied with looking beautiful, they never once question what does it mean. What is beauty? Looking at the past, many would realize that this was not the case. The ancient Greeks were convinced that an explanation of and maybe even the definition of beauty was simple, concrete and discoverable. Pythagoras played around with not only music but architecture and design where he found out that the most desirable shapes are those whose sides are related to the so-called golden ratio. In short, the golden ratio is the proportional relationship between two lines, for example, a and b such that if one puts a and b together (a+b) it would be equal to a as a is to b. In algebraic terms, this would give rise to an equation: (a/b = (a+b)/a). Furthermore, expressing this in a decimal would give a ratio of 1:1.61814. This does not sound much if you look at the three examples mentioned above. But, drawing out a rectangle with sides a and b, would prove its cosmic rightness. Yes, if you were on a deserted island and you had to pick a rectangle for some reason, this is the one you would want to pick. It is the so-called Godly rectangle.Then, one turns to Plato, who was able to include the beauty as one of his famous forms: archetypes. According to Plato, without them the reality is a set of blurry ramshackle imitations. Beauty was not in the eye of the beholder. The science of beauty rested on these two historians. Back then, the definition of beauty was easy to find but nowadays, not so much.Imagine the surprise, when one finds out that there is someone in the 20th century trying to disassemble the mysterious nature of beauty. His name is Dr. Stephen Marquardt and he is a retired plastic surgeon in Southern California. However, he is not one of those plastic surgeons you would see to enlarge your breasts, or make your lips Angelina Jolie. In fact, most of his life he worked on perfecting the beauty of victims with deformed faces. These victims were people who were born without chins or had a deformed face in ways you cannot imagine. They did not come to him to give them the gorgeousness that people demand nowadays. They came to him to ask for help to fix their face so that one day in the future they can digest their food orally. Because his patients did not care about the kind of a chin they would get but just wanted to have one, Dr. Marquardt was responsible for the formulation of the aesthetic perfection. After all, the future of their faces depended on his ability to find the chin that would fit their face and then make it work aesthetically. This is where the level of difficulty skyrocketed. Often, he would exit the surgery thinking that he has gotten someone's chin exactly right, only to find out when the bandages were off, that the chin did not work good on an aesthetic level.The Solution to the ProblemDr. Marquardt then decided to ramp up the degree of proportional precision. However, he had great difficulty in finding any information after Plato and Pythagoras and before Da Vinci. Even Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man said nothing about the face. Yes, the formula of the body showed perfection (arm span = height; height = hand length x 10) but there was no formula for the face and that is what interested him the most.He decided to start searching for an answer himself. Collecting photographs of faces from around the world that were considered beautiful, Marquardt measured their dimensions. While looking at the results of his measurements, something thrilling and peculiar happened - the golden ratio appeared. According to his research, beautiful people's lips were 1.618 wider than their noses and it seemed that their noses were 1.618 times wider than the tip of their noses. To make things even more interesting, even the triangle with the nose and the lips formed a golden triangle. After finishing his research, Marquardt went public with it calling it a 'Golden Mask' or blueprint for the perfect face. The Golden MaskMarquardt points out that the iris also consists of a golden ratio. He says that if one takes 10 golden triangles and arrange them with their sharp points touching gently, it will make a golden decagon that fits perfectly within an iris, whose vertices are neatly touching the rim. But, if one takes a golden square or a golden rectangle and arranges them in a perfect shape, wouldn't that also bring one back to the golden ratio rule?Looking at the photographs which separate a 'very unattractive face' from a 'beautiful face,' one would notice that for some odd reason the Golden Mask fits the very unattractive faces much better than one would expect. This is rather interesting, but Marquardt defends his point of view by stating that for the most part, human beings have evolved to be rather attractive. The society can keep calling some people ugly but that is because people have not yet started comparing their faces to the Golden Mask. It was, in fact, derived by studying faces which society deems beautiful. Marquardt was kind enough to show that even celebrities' faces follow this Golden Ratio. Take a look at Marilyn Monroe's face or of the other two models provided.However, if you want to understand the Golden Mask and Marquardt's research, you must think in terms of a golden ratio. If he is actually right when he says that the most pleasing faces have mouths that relate to their noses by the golden ratio, that is not nothing. Also, if he is right when he said that the width of the front two teeth in a supermodel's smile is 1.618 times the height of each tooth, then he might be onto something. But then again, maybe Plato was right when he said that nothing in this world is perfect: if one takes a look at the perfect face, how do you know that it is in fact perfect and according to whom? Is it because someone told you this or you want to believe it? And if soon people start comparing their faces to the Golden Mask, will they view themselves as unattractive just because their face does not follow the golden ratio? As you can see, opinions differ and this makes the whole issue very subjective.Once Picasso said 'Beauty?... To me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to.' Maybe humanity should keep it that way.If you would like to compare your face to the Golden Mask, take a look at this page.Additional websites used:Dr. Marquardt's websiteKhan Amore's Commentary on the Divine ProportionPictures: Courtesy of Dr. Marquardt