Can Beauty Be Measured?

While each individual may have their own opinion and reasoning behind what makes a woman beautiful, new research from the University of California finds that beauty is not only in the eye of the beholder, but that there is in fact a way to measure it.

According to researchers, key factors in determining what defines a beautiful woman lies in the positioning and arrangement of her eyes and mouth. The distance between a woman’s eyes and the distance between her eyes and her mouth are factored in when an opinion is formed about her beauty.

Pamela Pallett and Stephen Link of UC San Diego, together with Kang Lee of the University of Toronto tested and identified the optimal relation of the eyes, mouth and the edge of the face for individual beauty. To support their research, they asked university students, in four separate experiments, to compare the faces of women that had identical facial features, but varying distances among the eyes and mouth.

Based on their surveys, they found that females were seen as more attractive when the vertical distance between their eyes and mouth was approximately 36 percent of the length of their face and the horizontal distance between their eyes was approximately 46 percent of the width of their face.