Cannonieri + Fortis

Beauty is easy enough to spot, but tricky to define—despite countless attempts to do so. Sometime around 300 B.C., the Greek mathematician Euclid identified the "Golden Proportion," an ideal face two-thirds as wide as it is tall, with a nose no longer than the distance between the eyes. In the 1930s, Max Factor launched his Beauty Micro-meter, a-esque studded cage that measured every inch of a starlet's head to determine where she needed the makeup maestro's signature sleight of hand most. And in 1997, a retired California plastic surgeon introduced the Marquardt Mask, a robotic-looking web of lines that dissects faces using the ratio of 1 to 1.618, or phi. Identified in ancient Greece, this magical mystery ratio somehow governs the proportions of everything from human embryos to azalea buds, and, if the photo on the right is any indication, may also explain the meteoric rise of model Agyness Deyn.

Still, theories are one thing; results are another. And Tommer Leyvand may be the first person who has promised to deliver the goods (two-dimensionally, at least). A soft-spoken, Seattle-based computer scientist, Leyvand develops geographical mapping programs for a well-known software brand by day and perfects faces—strictly by special request—by night. The ELLE team stumbled across his "digitally beautified" before-and-after photos one afternoon at work. They were nothing short of amazing, like best-case-scenario cosmetic surgery; the "afters" didn't look model-fied or in any way unrecognizable, but, with a mere millimeter skimmed off a chin or a minutely extended brow—changes so small, they were barely identifiable—they had gone from attractive to something much...more attractive. Where could we sign up?

Developed during his graduate studies at Tel Aviv University in Israel, Leyvand's software is based on a study in which 100 photos of women and men were given attractiveness ratings between one and six. The size of and distance between the features of each face were measured and correlated for which scored well and which didn't. The resulting beauty scale enables Leyvand's program to morph any face toward a higher attractiveness rating.

One hundred subjects may not seem like that many when it comes to calculating something as ephemeral as true beauty, but Leyvand contends that attractiveness ratings are, in fact, universal—that the same numbers would hold true in any country or race, barring a region's specific cultural preferences for eye and hair color (which, interestingly, he says weigh more heavily upon our perception of someone's attractiveness than skin tone). "Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder," Leyvand says. "If I took the same photo and showed it to people from 10 different regions with 10 different backgrounds, I would get roughly the same results."

Beauty at the touch of a button? Fairly irresistible. But after our initial reaction of "Yes, please!" even ELLE's intrepid test-drivers—or this one, at least—grew wary. Would scratching that niggly little what-if-I-were-prettier itch be somehow satisfying? Or would it lead us to lament flaws we never knew we had? Manhattan plastic surgeon David Hidalgo, MD, puts it simply: "I'm not sure it's going to make you feel good about yourselves to find out how much better you could look." A relative of Leyvand's, for example, found that the software highlighted imperfections she'd long suspected. "Her lips were a little thin, and the distance between her mouth and nose was a bit longer than it should have been," Leyvand says matter-of-factly. Under that level of scrutiny, what happens next—plastic surgery?

But New York City–based makeup artist Sandy Linter—whose problem-solving maquillage skills recently earned her the curious job title of Lancôme's Beauty at Every Age Expert—is optimistic. "Don't worry," she says. "This is what makeup artists do every day, on everybody! Your face is long and thin? Blush on the forehead and chin will shorten it. Your eyes are too close together? That's easy—we blend your eyeliner up on the outer edge and add a lighter shadow at the inside corner."

Bravely soldiering on, we zipped our mug shots (the only angle the computer recognizes) off to Leyvand. But the morning he sent them back, I was greeted with cackles at the office door—not a good sign. While my already lovely colleagues had been subtly tweaked (in some cases improved, in others possibly not), I seemed to have contracted Elephantiasis, or at the very least, a severe allergic reaction. Was my face so out of whack it stumped a computer algorithm? No, explained Leyvand—I was just a bad model. The slight downturn of my face in the photos had thrown it off.

Actually, once the Elephant Girl situation was remedied, the biggest surprise of our transformations was that they were relatively minor (though, interestingly, each of our "afters" was a closer fit to the Marquardt Mask). My lips and eyes were minutely bigger; my eyebrows, oddly enough, lower; and my nose—my weakest link—remained relatively untouched.

I sent all four sets of photos to Hidalgo, who got out his ruler and started measuring. "They've hit the nail on the head, lip-wise," Hidalgo says. "There's more volume in both the upper and lower lip, which pretty much everybody benefitted from." The other alterations were hard to spot, even for a man who has fixed faces for more than 20 years. Not that it meant we had nothing to fix. "There were opportunities to alter things that would have made a bigger difference in the perception of beauty," Hidalgo says judiciously, before ticking off a laundry list of possible nips and tucks. (Hey, I asked.) "For starters, this person should have put a little more energy into the noses." Ouch.

Another surprise: Our eyes and brows—and my own lopsided lips—hadn't been perfectly leveled. What about symmetry, which has been hailed, over the past 20-odd years of research, as an indicator of youth, fertility, health, strength? "I find that symmetry is probably the least important sign of beauty," Hidalgo says. "The eye is much more tolerant of asymmetry than it is of suboptimal form and relationships of one feature to another."

New research suggests Hidalgo may be right. In a 2007 study of 200 faces that were computer-manipulated into varying degrees of asymmetry, UK researchers found that slight unevenness didn't impair a person's perceived beauty at all. And in an opposite study at University of California at Los Angeles, also completed last year, participants who rated computer-symmetricalized faces versus natural faces gave lower scores to those that were exactly even.

"Actually, symmetry affects only about 10 to 20 percent of an attractiveness rating," says Mounir Bashour, MD, PhD, a Toronto-based plastic surgeon, biomedical engineer, and author of the plastic-surgery insider's tome Is an Objective Measuring System for Facial Attractiveness Possible? (Dissertation.com). Based on his own studies, in which the photos of 35 male and female University of Toronto students were rated on an attractiveness scale from one to 10, then compared with the Marquardt Mask, Bashour believes that, while adherence to the mask accounts for 80 percent of perceived beauty, three other cues are also taken into account: youthfulness, sexual dimorphism (aka how feminine or masculine a face looks—for women, bigger lips, wider eyes; for men, a squarer jawline), and neoteny, or how childlike—soft, round features—the face looks.

As far as I'm concerned, the upshot of our photographic endeavor was that, rather than making us obsess over our various imperfections, it may have put a few into perspective. Beauty, something that weighs so heavily on our self-esteem, on how we perceive and are perceived by other people, is really just the tiniest mathematical tweak, a collection of increments. As Leyvand puts it, "The difference between the way you look and the way something that might be considered a better version of you looks is just a few tiny little changes. Just another half a centimeter between the eyes or a little rotation of the mouth—something that makeup could fix, if you wanted it to. If anything, that should trivialize [anxieties about imperfection]." In other words, the nose I agonized over as a teenager, for example, is just a few millimeters away from the pert proboscis I would have preferred. Why even bother changing something so minor?

That's not to say any of ELLE's guinea pigs have altogether stopped caring about being beautiful. For that, we can take comfort in the old "what's on the inside" cliché—something even Bashour agrees with. "What I study is photographic, two-dimensional attractiveness, photos with no dimension or sense of time or personality," he says. "In the real world, beauty has to do with elegance, sense of humor, how a person carries herself. It's something completely different."

Maggie Bullock Maggie Bullock is a writer and editor.

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