PhilipYoungMD: Facial Beauty Theory - New Ideas on What Makes a Face Beautiful Called the Circles of Prominence

PhilipYoungMD: Facial Beauty Theory - New Ideas on What Makes a Face Beautiful Called the Circles of Prominence

Facial beauty is all around us. It is hard to deny its importance. We are treated differently based on how we look from almost the moment we are born. Studies have shown that our mothers pay more attention to us and care for us better based on how attractive we are. Beautiful people get better grades but these differences are not proven on standardized test. More attractive people get promoted faster in the work environment. Obviously, the physically attractive are way more likely to get married, and studies show that this could be a tenfold difference.

Because beauty is so powerful, there has naturally been a drive to find out the answer of facial beauty. What makes someone beautiful or not? That is the major question. Would you want to know? There are a lot of people out there that would like to know the answer. Surprisingly, our ideas of facial aesthetics are still based on the very old theories called the neoclassical canons that were discovered by Leonardo da Vinci. These laws were based on older roman thought that were referred to as classical canons. Even today, when you look into some of the more recent textbooks such as those that cover the subjects of plastic surgery, da Vinci's theories dominate. So, it must be that these rules are true in their explanation of facial beauty. More recent research have shown that the neoclassical canons may explain some normative values, but the distinction of a face as beautiful has been found to be elusive. Other theories also attempt to answer this age old question. The theory of averageness postulates that average features make someone beautiful. A person long ago had a desire to study the faces of prisoners to see if a person's face correlated with their propensity to commit a crime. He did average morphs of the prisoner's faces. During this he found something captivating. The average face ended up being more beautiful than most of the other prisoner's faces. More recently, someone decided to see if this was true. After all, a theory or paper that states a scientific discovery is found to be more accurate if it is supported by another paper that is written by a different author at a different institution and sometimes different time. A paper in Nature, showed that averageness was not more beautiful and that there was something else that made a person physically attractive. However the details were not known. The magic number of phi where the ratio of the sum of the quantities to the larger quantity is equal to the ratio of the larger quantity to the smaller one is said to explain facial beauty. Really this number is the fraction of 2/3's. This is just a really complicated way at looking at this simple fraction of a number that can easily fit into the neoclassical canons. Hence, it really isn't a major addition to our understanding on facial aesthetics. The problem with older theories can be explained very simply. All of the previous theories were based on external landmarks in the face, although easily identifiable, that were unimportant to the viewer of a face. A true theory would have to be based on something that the viewer spent most of their time looking at.

The Circles of Prominence is a new theory on facial beauty that has made a major impact on finding this answer. It is a theory on facial beauty that IS based on what a person looks at when they analyze a face and assess whether beauty is present or not. It was awarded the Sir Harold Delf Gillies Award from the American Academy of Facial Plastic Surgery.

The foundation is based on what the viewer spends the most time looking at when they analyze a face. The progression starts with the most prominent object on the person's face and then the eyes examine the rest of the face. There is a hierarchy in this progression. Most of the time, it is the eyes that people look at. Specifically, one focuses on the iris, the colored portion of the eye. That is why evolutionarily, the whites have become so white to allow us to distinguish the colored part of the eye more easily. By concentrating on what is most important on the face, a theory to explain facial aesthetics becomes more easily accomplished.

The theory is most simply stated in this way. We will expound on this in more detail to color this overall picture in a better way. Everything on the face has to have an ideal or at least approaching this ideal over the many years that we select each other for mating purposes. This ideal is obviously between the values of zero and infinity. Because we spend so much time looking at the iris, the size and shape of the iris become part of deciding what these ideals are. For example the distance between the eyelid margin and eyebrows should be only one iris width ideally. The width of the nasal bridge should be one iris width, as well as the size of the nasal tip, the distance between the bottom of the nose and the lips, and the height of the lower lips pucker. Essentially if there is a distinct object on the face or a distinct distance, each measurement can be a multiple of an iris width from 1/2, 1, 1 1/2, 2, 2 1/2, 3 iris widths. This is the most basic part of the theory. Why is this likely the strongest argument on how facial aesthetics is analyzed? A viewer needs something to base all of these measurements. Because we spend so much time looking at the iris, this is our measuring stick for the simplicity in our minds.

The next element in this theory is based on the many regions of the face. The face is essentially an oval with multiple major regions in the face. A theory has to determine what those regions are. The Circles of Prominence states that the eyes, nose and mouth are those regions. Because of their importance, these regions need to be equally spaced from each other. But there needs to be a center in each of those areas. The centers for the eye region is the iris. The center for the nasal region is the nasal tip. It is the center of the lower lip for the mouth area. Each of these areas need to be equally spaced from one another. The distance from the iris to the midline should be 3 iris widths. The distance from the horizontal level of the iris to the nasal tip should also be 3 iris widths. The distance from the nasal tip to the lower lip and from the lower lip to the bottom of the chin are also this width.

This naturally arranges the facial elements into angles. The main angles are what the Circles of Prominence calls the obliques. The iris to nasal tip forms a 45 degree angle. This association also arranges the rest of the parts of the face in an ideal manner. The lower lips to the top of the ear is the second oblique that also determines where the shadowing of the lower cheek should start. An imaginary vertical line through the pupil should also determine where the shadowing should be increased on the face.

These are some of the major elements of this theory. In essence, the part of the face should blend in with each other smoothly without major breaks in the lighting of the face. The shadowing and highlights are determined by the facial volume with in the face to accentuate everything that was mentioned earlier.

To read more about this theory and to see helpful images you can click here to learn more about the Circles of Prominence, a New Theory on Facial Aesthetics

POST COMMENT

A New Era Burberry Outlet Online A Startling New Fact About How To Cure Hemorrhoids Homeopathically BURBERRY Got a New Kick Out Just For You Mini excavator for the broken machine industry open up new markets What Do New Merchants Expect From A Shopping Cart? Arguing is a Waste of Precious Time A new gas bubble inflates over emerging Europe: Business New Europe Leap into a new profession today with online college degrees Take advantage of a new education-online college degree Tips On Hiring A New York Moving And Storage Firm Crowdsourcing Adding New Dimension to Offshore Software Testing! Tips When Adopting a New Beagle Puppy Medical billing Service New Technology of Scrubbers