Musings in Search of a Muse: Expressions Make Beauty

Every now and then I think about what makes a face beautiful. That was one of the topics we talked about at work today and we quickly turned to the idea of the Golden Ratio, also known as the Divine Proportion, as a measure.

"Standards of beauty may be related to natural mathematical proportions which have captivated humans across cultures since the beginning of time, such as the golden ratio (approximately 1.618:1). Some beautiful faces do seem to exhibit such geometric proportions" (citation).

Beauty quantified. Novelty, spontaneity, and atmosphere stripped away. Now plastic surgeons plot attractive stimuli to the millimeter by cold mathematics Thus beauty escapes the subjective by metamorphosiing through the chrysalis of science. Mores the pity. Until one considers the perfect proportion through the eyes of great artists and their works.

One of the most famous examples of this is the Mona Lisa. This work, aside from containing many elements that raise questions about its origins and the artist's intentions, is nearly every high school student's introduction to basic principles such as forced perspective, light, and history. What many never learn is that it is that "the Length and the width of the paint itself is already in Golden Ratio. A Golden Rectangle also can be drawn around Mona's face" (citation). Da Vinci wasn't a Master for nothing. I could post many examples as technically correct as the Mona Lisa, but could any be as inherently beautiful?

The answer "no" reinvigorates the subjective arguments. Many people are enamored of newborns but the casual stranger will as often as not see such a child and inwardly think thank goodness that's not my kid!

At this point I am tempted to look into factors that form the subjective but I'll leave that to your imagination for now and maybe come back to it in another post. Instead, I would like to ruminate on the beauty I see in actress Piper Perabo, pictured at left. Likely there are factors such as youth, fame, style, and a number of other intangibles that would take up a few essays on their own. But look closely at the photo (click on it to enlarge it but come back to keep reading).

Do you see how expressive she is? That is a primary subjective factor to beauty that I prize well and above many commonly held preferences or those that can me measured mathematically. Emoting and expressing has to be natural to be a part of beauty as the aphorism "you're beautiful when you are angry" reminds us. This tells me that there is a real, feeling person inside that package. When I wrote on this topic recently, the post featured pictures of actress Anne Hathaway and one of the things I mentioned is that she had the same, fixed smile in each photo that I found in my research. Pleasant, of course, but invariably without heart and uninviting. Expression without intent is not very satisfying, at least not for very long.

Perhaps it is true that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and can't be successfully made, marketed, hyped, tweaked, or otherwise packaged. Now that's beautiful, isn't it?

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