*YOU* may think the white male is ideal but it appears that a whole lot of your women don't share that opinion.

Osiris, please don't leave tacky comments here.

I dunno...while I do think Osiris is being tacky, I can see his concern as being a legitimate one. "Ideal" to whom? If so, for what reasons?

I have read many interesting things about what defines sexual beauty to human beings and thought about how that information might apply to race. Still I am not really able to answer those questions.

Jason:

The pictures are taken from

Powell, Nelson, "Proportions of the aesthetic face", Nelson Powell, Brian Humphreys, Thieme-Stratton, 1984, from The American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery

obviously evaluating facial proportions for beauty is extremely necessary for people who make a living trying to make people more beautiful.

Dienekes, you're preaching to the choir. I'm not trying to put you on the defense, I'm just raising gray areas of interest.

Let's say I'm trapped on an island with 100 other people. I have a big hairy wart on my forehead, but I'm also a cherished leader, so my wart becomes associated with desirability. This quirk then becomes established culturally to be passed on through the generations. Perhaps one day a textbook on that island will have a picture of a male face with a wart on the forehead with the caption "the perfect face".

Now any plastic surgeon that follows that instruction on that island is going to make money fine, but if that text-book happens to make its way into the hands of a surgeon on this side of the shore it's going to make for some interesting law-suits.

I believe strongly in objective beauty, although there is always room for variation of taste. There are definitely universal esthetic norms, e.g., blemished vs. unblemished skin, and there are also racial esthetic norms, e.g., the preference for round-faced beauty in Mongoloids as opposed to egg-faced beauty in Greeks.

I also think that standards of beauty may evolve, but their evolution is much too slow to be affected by the prestige of exceptional individuals. I tend to think of racial esthetic evolution as a more or less linear process that inescapably leads to one or more ideal forms - this process however is often interrupted by demographic processes.

I'm not one to usually cry and moan about "cultural bias" but how can those pictures be *anything* else than the reflection of specific north-american (i'd even say anglo-saxon) somewhat dated ( the 50s come to mind )ideals of beauty ? It's perfectly fine of course for people of anglo-saxon ancestry to view this as ideal, but i don't see why other humans should agree .

It doesn't even look like a lot of Greeks would fit this profile, would they ? What about the hungarian woman on top of this article ? Does she fit those standards ?
I personally have a very low opinion of plastic surgeons's ideas about beauty. I find their beauty ideals tacky and unimaginative (if they could make every single woman a pamela anderson close with a ridiculous chest, they would!).

They simply provide a service.

If for some reason, it became mandatory for white american women to have huge bottoms, plastic surgeons would come to the rescue and their training manuals would feature drawings that you'd probably disapprove of .

>> I'm not one to usually cry and moan about "cultural bias" but how can those pictures be *anything* else than the reflection of specific north-american (i'd even say anglo-saxon) somewhat dated ( the 50s come to mind )ideals of beauty ?

Maybe the style of drawing that was used gives you that impression. The main point of these drawings isn't the person, but rather the angular measurements. They had to use somebody to superimpose the angular measurements on, so they chose to draw it this way.

>> It doesn't even look like a lot of Greeks would fit this profile, would they ? What about the hungarian woman on top of this article ? Does she fit those standards ?

How could I know, since I don't have a profile shot of her? It does make sense to me though that deviation from a central type might cause a subject to appear less beautiful. I won't say that these particular values are set in stone, since they're derived from a number of more detailed references which the volume I cited drew from.

Anyway, in ptinciple, I like this type of research, because I think beauty is objective to a great degree, and hence should be studied scientifically. This has great applications, not only in cosmetic surgery, but in art as well where this type of study started to begin with (cf. kanon of Polykleitos)

I have read somewhere that the closest that female attractiveness hits the "ideal" in a known person is Michell Pfeiffer. Has anyone heard this before?

Pfeiffer is too square-faced and small-eyed to exemplify ideal feminine beauty according to my criterion.

What's attractive and what's not attractive certainly has a basis in some part in human biology. But I am skeptical of the idea of an "ideal" beauty or facial shape or combination of features (within the normal range of human variation). Much of this is probably flexible in the context of individuals. For instance people with face shape A and body type B might be more inclined to prefer a person with face type C and body type D.

It might be silly for caucasian people to assume that this "ideal" type will look - suprise, suprise - caucasian. Even if it was found to be, (through some sort of world poll, for instance) that still wouldn't tell us why.