Scientists claim beauty is actually skin deep
November 16, 2009 - After trying to convince us for years that symmetry is the key to beauty, now a group of scientiets claim that, this time, they now know for sure what makes a face beautiful. For sure this time. Really.
Skin tone, apparently. After conducting an experiment wherein they showed idealized faces to a group of test subjects, the faces with the most luminous or radiant skin were deemed to be the most attractive. Every other factor was accounted in terms of facial attractiveness (which leads to the question of how they determined what made them attractive) so that the only true variable left was the luminence of the skin. Not willing to abandon their old theories completely, the scientists quickly concluded that healthy skin implies a healthy mate, and therefore healthy offspring.
It seems more likely that in the absence of other identifiable differences, a person will naturally look at the one variable that changes from face to face and, using their own value scale, will judge that particular aspect of beauty against all the other examples. If the scientists had made everything the same except eyebrows and run the same experiment, the subjects would have judged who had the most beautiful eyebrows. It doesn't mean eyebrows are the key to beauty.
If you can't judge a whole face in terms of the values it represents to you, you will judge whatever part of it you can. The key point is that you judge based on representation of values, not on how healthy your non-existent kids might someday be.
Who pays these guys to come up with experiments like this, anyway?
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