Does the Golden Ratio (1.618) Predict People's Opinion of Beauty?

Overview

Objectives/Goals The goal was to determine if people with facial features that are consistent with the Golden Ratio (phi=1.618) are regarded as more beautiful than people whose facial features have the greatest variance from the Golden Ratio. Methods/Materials The materials used were SurveyMonkey, 50 internet photos, Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Email), Microsoft Excel. An online survey was created using SurveyMonkey, with the 50 random color photos inserted into the survey. The survey was posted on social media. Raw data collected from the survey was analyzed to determine which photos were rated as the most beautiful and the least attractive (1 to 5). Each of the 50 photos were measured with a metric ruler (e.g. top of head to chin, top of head to pupil, pupil to nose tip, etc) to determine 12 separate facial feature measurements. Ratios of the facial feature measurements were entered into Microsoft Excel and compared to the Golden Ratio. The absolute value variance between the Golden Ratio and each facial ratio was calculated, compared to the survey ranking, and graphed. Results The survey data and graphs showed that there was no consistent trend between rankings of beauty selections and facial features that had the smallest absolute value variance to the Golden Ratio. The data was further sorted as follows: male survey takers rating males, male survey takers rating females, female survey takers rating males, female survey takers rating females; survey takers ages 8 and 25, 25 and 45, and 45 and 75. Each of the data sets selected above ended up with inconsistent results similar to the larger data set. Conclusions/Discussion It was anticipated that survey participants would select beautiful faces based on facial features with the smallest variance to the Golden Ratio. However, the survey takers selected the photo with the smallest absolute variance to the Golden Ratio only 68.75% , with 18 to 24 year olds predicting the most accurately at 26.9%. The lack of a clear connection appears to indicate that survey takers select photos based on personal preferences outside of facial measurements. This could have been one of the errors in the hypothesis, as beauty may be based on personal preferences such as hairstyle, make up, race, or the color of the clothing.

Competition history

• CSEF 2015 Behavioral & Social Sciences · Entry J0402

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• CSEF Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• Every CSEF 2015 project