Beauty and the Golden Proportions

The software program, developed by computer scientists in Israel, is based on the responses of 68 men and women, age 25 to 40, from Israel and Germany, who viewed photographs of white male and female faces and picked the most attractive ones.

Scientists took the data and applied an algorithm involving 234 measurements between facial features, including the distances between lips and chin, the forehead and the eyes, or between the eyes.

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.

Tommer Leyvand, who developed the “beautification” software with three others at Tel Aviv University and who works in development for Microsoft in Redmond, Wash., said the goal was not to argue that the altered faces are more beautiful than the originals. Instead, he said, it was to tackle the challenge of altering a face according to agreed-upon standards of attractiveness, while producing a result that left the face completely recognizable, rather than the product of cosmetic surgery or digital retouching.

“This tool shows in the most simple fashion how easy it is to manipulate photographs and make people more attractive,” Mr. Leyvand said. “But the difference is so subtle that it just shows how insignificant it is. We’re talking about a few inches maybe and a slightly changed perception.”

While several psychological studies over the last few decades also suggest that perceptions of beauty and attractiveness tend to be universal, critics of that work say it is debatable whether a person’s beauty is actually enhanced by such changes. Character can be lost. A blandness can set in. The quirky may become plain.

When Mr. Leyvand put a photograph of Brigitte Bardot through his program, her full and puckered lips were deflated, and the world-famous beauty seemed less striking — less like herself. 

(By contrast, the before and after shots of the actor James Franco were almost indistinguishable, suggesting his classically handsome face is already pretty perfect.)

Artists and architects since the Renaissance — and more recently, plastic surgeons — have tried to quantify beauty using the theory of the golden ratio, which holds that there is an ideal relationship between two measurements that can be expressed as a mathematical constant. Da Vinci, Dalí and Mondrian all are said to have used the golden ratio in their art.

“The first reaction we have to faces will be based on face symmetry, health, averageness,” said Alexander Nehamas, a philosopher and professor of the humanities and comparative literature at Princeton, who has written about beauty. “But we never see a face like that in real life. We see faces in connection with people expressing emotions and ideas, all those aspects of the face are essential to our deciding whether a face or a person is beautiful.”