Can you measure beauty?
A dozen photographs. In a standard position (more or less). Hair tied back (more or less). Who's beautiful? What's beautiful about them? What is beauty?
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I talked about this in an earlier blog post. Although orthodontists and facial surgeons are all concerned with beautiful smiles and faces, essentially there are many different measurements you can make about the face, but there isn't really a definite agreement among us all as to what will always work out as the ideal measurement to give a beautiful face.
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One of the most common sets of measurements we use are based on the profile view. This is strange, because we never see ourselves in profile, not even in a mirror, and we very rarely look at anyone else in profile (unless you're an orthodontist, or you take pictures of people who are going to prison).
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I thought I'd post some profile photos of various people who are beautiful for a living. It's difficult to find profile photos, as it's not a frequently taken photo - unless you're going to prison, but these are some I came up with. (here's the legal bit- They're just hauled off the internet incidentally- -I make no claim for the ownership, copyright or anything else of the photos, and the people in them have nothing to do with this article!). They've also been adjusted so they're all about the same size and facing the same way for comparison.
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Which of them can you recognise? Which do you like best? Which do you like least? And which of them do you think has an ideal aesthetic soft tissue (ie skin/lips/nose/chin) balance?
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Feel free to email your thoughts into us, and I'll come back to this topic in a while with your comments and the answer to who's got the ideal balance of features.
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