Who's the fairest of them all?
Julian De Silva, a London-based cosmetic surgeon, thinks he may have the answer.
He used a mathematical ratio sometimes referred to as the "Golden Ratio" and told The Daily Mail that actress Amber Heard is the person with "the most beautiful face in the world, according to science."
Here's a taste of the story:
Amber Heard's face was found to be 91.85 percent accurate to the Greek Golden Ratio of Beauty Phi — which for thousands of years was thought to hold the secret formula of perfection ... From pictures, her eyes, eyebrows, nose, lips, chin, jaw, and facial shape were measured and 12 key marker points were analyzed and found to be 91.85 percent of the Greek ratio of Phi which is 1.618.
Kim Kardashian's face came second with 91.39 per cent, Kate Moss was third with 91.06 percent, Blurred Lines model Emily Ratajkowski was fourth with 90.8 percent, and Kendall Jenner was fifth with 90.18 percent accuracy of her features to the beauty ratio Phi.
De Silva's website describes him as a "facial cosmetic surgeon who specializes in the eyes, nose, face and neck areas only." He offers women his formula for calculating their own beauty, based on the "golden" ratio of 1.62.
But is his golden ratio method scientifically sound? And can it dictate who we find attractive or unattractive?
John Allen Paulos, a Temple University research mathematician and author of books like "Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences," doesn't think so.
"There's no evidence for most of these claims," he said in a call with Tech Insider. "And when there is, it's merely descriptive. Yes, okay, that ratio is approximately 1.62, but so what? There's lots of other rectangles with ratios like 1.8 and 1.5."
"It's not such an unusual ratio," he added. "It's a common rectangle."
A 5x3 index card, for example, meets the Golden Ratio standard.
"There's no scientific discovery that's ever followed from any kind of scientific application of the 'Golden Ratio,'" he said. "It doesn't predict anything. It isn't at the base of any sort of argument that has some kind of scientific content."
The Golden Ratio describes two measures of any kind. Let's use line segments, as in the example below. For the measures to exist in "golden" ratio to one another, the ratio between the smaller measure and the larger one must equal the ratio between the larger measure and the sum of the two measures added together. When that's the case, the ratio is an irrational number close to 1.62, often denoted by the Greek letter Phi.
