The origin and meaning of facial beauty represent a longstanding puzzle. Despite the profuse literature devoted to facial attractiveness, its very nature, its determinants and the nature of inter-person differences remain controversial issues. Here we tackle such questions proposing a novel experimental approach in which human subjects, instead of rating natural faces,
are allowed to efficiently explore the face-space and “sculpt” their favorite variation of a reference facial image. The results reveal that different subjects prefer distinguishable regions of the face-space, highlighting the essential subjectivity of the phenomenon.
The different sculpted facial vectors exhibit strong correlations among pairs of facial distances, characterising the underlying universality and complexity of the cognitive processes, and the relative relevance and robustness of the different facial distances.
The notions of body beauty and harmony of proportions have fascinated scholars for centuries. From the ancient Greek canons, a countless number of studies have focused on unfolding what is behind the beauty of the face and the body. Nowadays the notion of facial beauty is a fast expanding field in many different disciplines including developmental psychology,
evolutionary biology, sociology, cognitive science and neuroscience Still, despite a profuse and multi-disciplinary literature, questions like the very nature of facial attractiveness, its determinants, and the origin of inter-subject variability of aesthetic criteria,
elude a satisfactory understanding. Here, we revisit the question drawing conclusions based on an empirical approach through which we allow human subjects to “sculpt” their favorite facial variations by navigating the so called face-space and converging on specific attractors, or preferred regions in the face-space.
