A word of explanation: A year or two ago, for no apparent reason, I sent around an email to various friends, blithering on about whether or not perceptions of beauty, particularly of the facial sort, were based on perceived symmetry. (This is explained in more detail shortly.) Goofy and pointless blather, yes, but I received some interesting replies. So, just for the hell of it, here's Part One of the Facial Symmetry rant:  

     The other day, I was reading Scott Westerfeld's UGLIES, an young-adult SF novel set in a future milieu where everyone gets turned into insanely attractive "pretties" at age 16. A very good book, yes, but it frequently mentions the oft-repeated theory that our perception of attractiveness is all about the extreme degree of facial symmetry possessed by beautiful people, and how this ties in to a subconscious connotation of good health and high reproductive quality. I believe this theory gained popularity after a study that showed its subjects pictures of young people with both "normal" faces and faces photographically altered for greater facial-feature balance and evenness, and found that the latter group was widely perceived as being more attractive.   

      The only thing is, I'm starting to have my doubts about the whole "beauty = facial symmetry" concept. While, admittedly, someone with a wildly off-balance face prolly ain't gonna be perceived as a "hottie," I'm not convinced that beautiful faces are necessarily beautiful because of their facial-structure equilibrium.

     Take this excerpt from a LA Times article about Bettie Page:

 
     (snip)

      Perhaps that explains fans like Minnesota artist Rick Volkmar, who has spent years painstakingly touching up old black-and-white Bettie Page photos, erasing rips and tears and thousands of tiny white specks with a fine brush to rebuild the mesh of her stockings, the sheen of her hair, the shadows on her face.

     In the process, Volkmar developed carpal tunnel syndrome and learned a lot about her anatomy.

  "Her right eyebrow slants up and is shorter than the left one; her right nostril is higher than her left nostril," he noted. "The indent beneath her nose and above her upper lip is unusually wide. Her four front incisors are larger than normal.

   "Her right eye is lower than the left one and slants down…. Her right knee has a dimple in it, and there is a famous notch on the back of her right thigh, four inches above the knee. Her thumb and hands are muscular, almost mannish. Same with her feet.

  "Her rear end is noticeably squarish, and there are two creases under the left buttocks and one under her right buttocks….

 "It all adds up to this," he said. "She looks like fun."

 That alchemy of asymmetry and temperament inadvertently unleashed a cultural movement.

 (snip)

  Ain't many women hotter than Bettie Page from back in the day, but listen to that list of asmmetrical flaws! Lordy loo! She must, therefore, have been a hideous, facially distorted beast, according to the "beauty = facial symmetry" theory! Obviously, though, that just waran't the case.

     Moreover, I doubt that anyone promulgating this theory was ever an artist... and lemme tell you, speaking as an artist, there is nothing, NOTHING harder to draw than the perfect symmetry of a straight-on, eye-level, close-up shot of a beautiful person's face. It's phenomenally diffcult to get (in particular) the eyes and the sides of the face to mirror each other perfectly. I once spent most of a day redrawing a straight-on close-up of Shasti from the Dirty Pair, erasing and flipping the image on a lightboard and redrawing it upwards of sixty or seventy times (no, really)... and the shot still wound up flawed, once I checked it reversed in a mirror. Now, this sounds like an argument FOR the "beauty = symmetry" thing, but the bizarre fact is that you can, in fact, produce straight-on shots that SEEM to be attractive, but turn out to be wildly distorted and biased when you look at the images flopped. The truth is, nowadays I no longer check the faces I draw reversed in a mirror or a lightbox, even though extreme degrees of right-hand bias are guaranteed to be seen when the images are viewed that way. As long as the shot still looks attractive "forwards," I just blunder on regardless.

     Anyway, most of the time, you're better off drawing a face from a very slight angle rather than a straight-on shot (if not an outright 3/4 angle), which makes the facial shot inherently asymmetrical and much, MUCH (make that MUUUUUCH) less problematic to draw. But think about it: ALL possible camera views of a pretty face that aren't taken from a direct, straight-on angle are therefore asymmetrical, with one side of the face larger than the other, one eye smaller than the other, the lines of the face dwindling off in perspective, and so on. Even worse is a side-angled profile shot of a face, which doesn't even show the twinned sets of eyes, cheekbones, nostrils and the like that are necessary to express facial symmetry in the first place. Yet we still find 3/4 and profile images of a beautiful person to be attractive, even though no symmetry cues can actually be perceived from these angles... and considering that we would almost never see perfectly straight-on views of pretty faces in the media or in real life, that might suggest that symmetry perception can't possibly be the sole reason why we find particular faces attractive.

     Maybe, maybe not. Then again, s'not like I have another theory in mind to explain why certain faces are beautiful or not.  Oh, well.    

Now, here's part two, after I received a bunch o' replies via email:

 Jason M. dug up the following study...

 http://www.uni-regensburg.de/Fakultaeten/phil_Fak_II/Psychologie/Psy_II/beautycheck/english/symmetrie/symmetrie.htm

 ...which more or less supports what I was saying. A quote:

 "The results from our experiment regarding 'symmetry' show that facial symmetry affects the perceived attractiveness. However, the effect is rather small and by far not as influential as it has been reported in the media. To sum up our findings: Very asymmetric faces are judged rather unattractive, but very unattractive faces are not necessarily asymmetric. And vice versa : very symmetrical faces need not necessarily be judged attractive and very attractive faces often show deviations from perfect symmetry (see report!). Based on our results, symmetry only seems to be a rather weak indicator for attractiveness. Often it is even difficult to distinguish between the original and the perfectly symmetrical version, because irregularities in shape are rather insignificant. Therefore, the strong influence of symmetry that has been reported in the scientific literature over and over again is questionable." 

     Check out some of the side links of that website, many of which are quite interesting, if not disturbing. To quote from the "social perception" page:

    "Taking everything together it can be said that the most attractive face does not exist in reality - they are computed according to certain principles by machines.

    "Having these results in mind it is also not surprising that a model agency from Munich chose 88% artificial faces (14 out of 16 selected faces) for potentially being interesting as a model for the category 'beauty'. Only two natural male faces could keep up with the computer generated ones, within the group of female faces no natural faces have been selected!"

     Note that the specific website page to which I linked features a number of images of the "mirrored/ split face" concept you've prolly heard of (and to which several e-mailers referred), in which, after someone's face is photographed from straight on, "one half of the facial image is duplicated, mirrored along a vertical axis and finally added to the remaining half of the original face." This process generally results in two very different-looking faces, depending on which side of the face was used; most famously, Edgar Allen Poe's portrait was mirrored/ split like this to show how different each half of his face was. As Lea H. notes, you can try this on your own image over at:

http://www.symface.com/.

Note, however, that to get a truly accurate view of your face's symmetry or lack thereof, you would need an image in which your face was PERFECTLY aligned straight-on to the camera... Otherwise, even the slightest deviation to an oblique angle will produce quite distorted results, which explains why the "split face" effect is often exaggerated.   

    Nick J. writes:

    "I tend to believe that symmetry works to a point, essentially meaning 'OK, this one won't spit out mutant children' at a genetic level, but then, for beauty (as opposed to prettyness) there have to be some unique features: a lop-sided smile, an off-kilter nose....something. Look at all the great beauties: Dietrich, Bergman,  Kelly, Monroe, and they were all 'off' a bit."

    Carla puts it rather more bluntly:

"Symmetry-as-beauty is bullshit. All the arts hinge on playing with symmetry and asymmetry; look at ballet, which contains symmetrical poses, but focuses upon exaggeratedly asymmetrical ones."    

 
    Regarding the Scott Westerfeld SF novel, UGLIES, that started this train of thought chugging in the first place... For those who've not read it, I should clarify that the book's milieu, in which everyone is transformed into hyperattractive "Pretties" at age 16, does so in order to balance out and democratize the effects and advantages of individual beauty. This seems a utopic impulse at first, but we soon find out that less savory motives underlie that culture's creation of "universal beauty"... (Anyhoo, the story continues with the sequel, PRETTIES, and concludes with the novel SPECIALS, by the way.)

     Well, thought I'd mention a different SF story that approaches the same ends by almost exactly the opposite means. In Ted Chiang's short story* "Liking What You See", controversy roils a college campus as the school mulls over whether or not to mandate that its students be induced into a temporary neurological condition called "calliagnosis." In this state, the students would still be able to recognize a pretty face, but would experience no actual aesthetic response to it. Thus, Chiang's milieu seeks to nullify the unfair advantages of individual beauty by negating the perception of individual beauty in the first place (instead of the UGLIES concept of universalizing beauty). Sounds tiresomely PC, I know (the perils of "lookism," ahoy!), but Chiang's story is actually quite balanced and thought-provoking. 

*From his fine collection "Stories of Your Life and Others," which I strongly recommend.

Well, there you go... Was that not a completely random and inexplicable blog post? Yay! Maybe next time in Inexplicable Blog Posts, I'll put up my extremely elaborate justification for why the Dirty Pair dress the way they do! (Or maybe not.)