Average beauties

Think of a face that you find beautiful. To you, that face is distinct and even special but it may surprise you that to science, that face is average – YOUR average. It is the average of all faces that you are mostly exposed to and thus, has been primed to recognize.

The Association for Psychological Science has just issued a press release that a study that points to this claim was conducted by Piotr Winkielman of the University of California, San Diego and his colleagues Jamin Halberstadt, Tedra Fazendeiro and Steve Catty, and is found in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science.

In their study, they showed 17 faces of individuals, with one of them being the composite of the 16 other faces. The subjects found the composite face as the most favorable and also took a very short time to judge them as such. This led the scientists to think that what we think is beautiful or pleasing is something that, in their words, is "easy on the mind" – something that the brain does not have to strain too hard to recognize.

If you think this applied only to faces, and therefore has something to do only with human attraction, think again. They tried showing each of the subjects prototype neutral objects made up of dots and geometric patterns. Then later, the subjects were asked to rate variations of the respective prototypes. Still, the pattern that turned out to be most favored by our subjects is the one that was closest to the respective prototypes they were previously shown. This made me think of how manufacturers and designers know the items that popular culture will buy. Apparently, just having lots of them everywhere we go, primes us to buy more of them. It feeds on itself! At a certain level, popular culture is comforting but from another perspective, it can also be stunting and suffocating.

Winkielman showed that "we can make an arbitrary pattern likeable just by preparing the mind to recognize it quickly." I guess it is the brain’s way of saving energy – energy that we can later use for something more straining to its neural connections, which in modern times, probably means just more TV channels. This study made me want to revisit the concept of "popular beauty" and rethink whether we are simply populating our visual world with things that are estimations of the mélange of faces that we have been used to. If that were so, there is something to be said about beauty and "habit" – the habitual faces that we are exposed to in our daily lives.

There is nothing wrong with habit per se. I guess it is comforting to a populace to see the same faces deemed beautiful on billboards, films and TV shows. But habit could also be the Great Wall that alienates passion and new thoughts. Maybe we should worry about our collective perception of beauty as dictated by popular media. What startles the mind and pushes it into a new terrain is not the "average" but "extreme" or at least the "different." That is why society needs art, to challenge our habitual ways of perceiving. Otherwise, we will all just constantly muddle through the ordinariness of averages. Boring!

This study also supports that proverb about beauty being in the eyes of the beholder. In the days before long-haul journeys, whom you see from the day you were born till the day you die, belonged to a smaller geographic and ethnic origin than most people experience today. With our exposure to different faces, through media and in person in our travels, the range of faces we are exposed to, is much larger, making us see that there is something "artificial" about what we find "beautiful" in our own minds. This immediately made me think about being "conditioned," whether deliberately or not, to find certain faces and things beautiful. Then, we are probably being brainwashed into preferring what others want us to think is beautiful!

I think I still prefer the choices I have made before I learned of this study but it made me respect, even more, the choices of other people, and other cultures. I came across the work of a prolific artist named Nancy Burson (www.nancyburson.com) who wanted to drive this point about what we think makes us so "beautiful" is in different shapes and sizes in all of humanity. Her point is fleshed out in her Human Race Machine, which is like a Foto-Me machine where it takes your photo and then "layers onto or removes various outward features of racial identity to show what you might look like." Her website also has some interesting composites of faces which I personally found more pleasant than the distinct faces from which the composites were formed.

So the next time you see someone judged as the most beautiful on the street, in the city, on the island, on the planet or what I find to be comically presumptuous, in the universe – it is more of a revelation on the exposure and experience of those who judged her. The average of all the judges’ averages is the most beautiful. She becomes, at least for the period of her reign, the reigning "absolute" average.

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