7 secrets to the perfect FACE
(So how many have you got?)
Now that we’re at the end of this series, you’re probably still puzzled as to what the perfect face should look like.
Maybe you won’t be surprised to learn that one of the world’s top plastic surgeons, Canadian Dr Arthur Swift, has come up with a formula for the ideal female face — it’s oo7 PHI (as in oh-oh-7 as opposed to zero-zeroseven). whether you agree with him or not, it is what many practitioners adhere to.
The OO Formula
FIRST, let’s look at the ‘o’s. Key characteristics of the beautiful face are that it is oval in shape (every culture apparently prefers its women to have an oval or heart-shaped face), and that the cheeks show what’s called an ‘ogee curve’.
This is the almost- S- shaped double-bend that sways outwards as you trace the line of the cheekbones, then inwards and down towards the chin.
oval and ogee — that’s the two ‘o’s.
Magnificent Seven
THE ‘magnificent seven’ are the key features that we all take note of when we are assessing the beauty of a face:
1 The triangle of youth (described below).
2 The height of the forehead (not too high, not too low).
3 The shape of the eyebrows (lightly arched).
4 The size and spacing of the eyes (pleasingly large, not too close together).
5 The shape of the nose (appropriate to the height of the face).
6 The width and height of the lips ( generous, but again, appropriate to the face that they are in).
7 How clear and smooth the skin is ( the clearer the skin, the younger we judge a face to be).
If we find all of these key features pleasing — well, according to Dr Swift, that’s a beautiful face.
Triangle of Youth
THE widest point of a beautiful face is the measurement across its well- shaped cheeks, which taper down towards the chin and emphasise what is popularly known as the ‘triangle of youth’.
That means if you were to draw an inverted triangle and superimpose it on the image of a lovely face, two of its points will be at the cheekbones, and the third will be at the chin. As the face gets older, the cheeks lose volume, and the jowls begin to sag, and that triangle of youth disappears.
In fact, it flips position, with the two widest points being the corners of the jaw, and the third point starting at the nose.
when a cosmetic practitioner is assessing a face, he or she is also looking at these features, to assess how that face is ageing and how they might make it look more lovely.
Perhaps they could improve the facial contours, or make the face a little more symmetrical. Most of us have asymmetric faces, and although symmetry is something the human eye finds pleasing, if you analyse most very beautiful faces, it is their slight asymmetry that gives them their real attraction. It also stops them from looking robotically perfect.
A practitioner could help restore the triangle of youth, or help make the skin look fresher and clearer with the treatments at their disposal.
while it might seem that there’s not a lot that can be done about, say, a long face, because that’s just the way it is built, judicious use of facial fillers in the cheeks and chin can alter the way light falls on that face, which can make it look shorter and therefore better proportioned.
The Golden Ratio
THERE’S also a mathematical element to all this, in the form of the golden ratio or ‘divine proportion’. That’s the ratio of 1 to 1.618; this second number is known as Phi, after the Greek sculptor Phidias, who used this proportion in much of his work.
This ratio sounds baffling until you see how pleasing things that have these proportions appear to the human eye.
I say ‘ things’ because this golden ratio crops up everywhere, from the structure of DNA to the proportions in a beautiful face.
Angelina Jolie’s lips, for example, comply to this ratio — if her lips are the 1.618 bit, each side of her face beside those lips is 1. It works for many facial elements in a very beautiful face — the length of the nose, the position of the eyes and the length of the chin will all conform to some aspect of the Golden Ratio.
If you’re a particularly precise sort of cosmetic practitioner, you might even want to try applying the principles of the golden ratio to your clients.
Arthur Swift does, and has even had made a set of gold-coloured callipers that measure out the ratio, which he uses to demonstrate to clients his views on what looks good on a face and how he might use the principles of Phi and divine proportion on their faces.
He does not do this to make patients into some cookie-cutter version of themselves, but to move the proportions of their face closer to the ideals that are known to be pleasing.
Global Beauty Ideal
THERE’S yet another strange-but-true observation from the beauty world: good- looking people all over the world look more like each other than ordinary-looking people of their own ethnic group.
That may sound highly unlikely, but if you look closely at, say, top models or film stars from any country, you’ll see that they tick almost all of the boxes on that oo7 list.