Beautifully Average
Published Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
See the pretty young lady on the right? Do you know her? Would you like to? I bet you would. Unfortunately, she does not exists. She is a computational average of 42 female faces.
Experimental psychologists Lisa DeBruine and Ben Jones (and others) working out of University of Aberdeen in Scotland have put together a fantastic site of physiological experiments involving faces. I’ve mentioned their website www.faceresearch.org before but this “Make and Average” is really fun. You can select two or more faces from a set of 91 faces (if my count was right). When you click the “View Average” button the site will generate an average of all the faces you selected.
Some of the averages look odd but many look like real people. The face above is the average of all 42 woman on the site. Its amazing how symmetric and pretty she is. If you look at the source faces they are all very asymmetric and not that attractive at all. But if we average them together we end up with a very attractive person. What does this say about our sense of beauty? I’m not a physiologist nor psychologist but I’m sure it means something.
By the way, ladies, the average guy looks pretty good also.