A study of facial beauty and fashion

Abstract

The question of whether there is such an entity as beauty that objectively and universally exists, has attracted debates among philosophers, psychologists and biologists for centuries [Etcoff, 1994, Wolf, 1990 & Berys & Dominic, 2001]. One school of thinking believed beauty is in the eye of the beholder. However, this cannot explain why infants would stare at attractive faces [Humphrey, 1973 & Langlois, 1990]. With regard to body attractiveness, BMI (Body mass index), WHR (Waist to hip ratio), and VHI (Volume height index) have been found to be cues to human body attractiveness [Tovee et al., 1999, Tovee et al., 2002, Fan, et al, 2007]. With regard to facial attractiveness, facial activeness and symmetry were tested to be the important cues to facial attractiveness. In addition, some neoclassical cannons and golden ratios of facial measurements have also been proposed to be the ideal proportions and ratios to assess attractive faces, However, such putative criteria have rarely been tested statistically. This research was therefore aimed at investigating the contributions of different ratios of East Asian female facial features that are combined with hairstyle and neckline to the beauty attractiveness. Multivariate statistical analysis was applied to identify the key factors of facial features related to facial attractiveness and a non-linear regression model was established to map the general trends of the effect of facial ratios on facial attractiveness. It concludes that facial beauty was much dependent on certain facial ratios. Having said that, the optimal facial ratios are not the previously proposed golden ratio while and the findings indicate that both genders have different approaches to the judgment of attractiveness. The analysis also revealed that a proper coordination of hairstyle and neckline can enhance the attractiveness of females.