[Czymra]

Originally Posted by asteram

Ten years or so ago Discover magazine had a cover article on beauty. It was a winner and has stuck with me since.

They took digital photos of beautiful people and combined them, looking for a composite of beauty or an ideal. They also took thousands of photos of ordinary and ugly people and combined them, looking for what makes "ordinary" and what makes "ugly".

Here's what they found: Beauty, so far a human faces go, is the same thing as average. Truly, that's what they found. If they took a thousand photos of random women's faces and digitally combined them, averaged them in other words, the resulting face was percieved as more beautiful than any of the individual faces.

I believe it has everything to do with our DNA and reproductive drive; the body consciousness or unconscious, RE reproduction, strives for the mean, not the extreme, in offspring. This is why one sees very short women marrying very tall men, and short guys lusting after tall girls: the reproductive consciousness of the body desires the offspring to be the average, not the extreme. QED, we perceive that which approaches closest to the overall average of human appearance as the most beautiful.

Note the famous National Geographic cover photo of the green-eyed refugee girl in Afghanistan: She is spectacularly average. Venezuela, where I live, is famous for its beautiful women. Venezuela is also a complete melting pot of races which average out.

Wow. I read a similar study but all it concluded is that the body needed to have 'sharp and distinct features' and the face 'soft and smooth features'.
If that doesn't sound like an american stereotype.

Thanks for sharing!