Esthetics

The following image shows three types of eyebrows: high positioned with maximum height in the middle, high positioned with maximum height in the lateral third and low positioned with maximum height in the lateral third, respectively.

Mowlavi et al.(1) assessed the relationship between earlobe proportions and attractiveness in a sample of white North Americans.

The nasion is shown below, and can be roughly regarded as the indentation of the nasal bones around where the nose meets the forehead.  It may also be referred to as the radix, sellion or the soft-tissue nasion, though the radix is better conceptualized as the region centered at the nasion and extending to the eyebrows above and mid-eye level below.

The mandible is the lower jaw.  This article addresses how attractiveness ratings vary as a function of the extent to which the mandible is protruding among individuals of European ancestry.

Igor Niechajev (I.N.) and Per-Olle Haraldsson (P.O.H.), two of the most active rhinoplasty (nose jobs ) surgeons in Stockholm, Sweden, described the ethnic profile of their aesthetic rhinoplasty surgery patients from 1985-1995(1).  The patients were residents of Stockholm, Sweden.  The ethnic breakdown is shown below.

In a study(1), the authors took 12 white women with no history of nasal trauma or nasal surgery and morphed their side view photographs to come up with the following profile, representing the average among them.

Models trends in the twentieth century have been extensively addressed within this site.  Nevertheless, here is another study(1; zip) that documents model trends in the twentieth century, and some comments on it are pertinent.

The medial canthus is the inner corner of the eye, formed by the junction of the upper and lower eyelids.  In the two images below, the image on top shows a picture of the eyes of a woman and the image below it shows the same picture with the medial canthus digitally tilted (using Adobe photoshop).  Bashour and Geist investigated whether slightly increasing the tilt of the medial canthus increases attractiveness(1).

The body mass index (BMI) is a measure of how much weight is carried with respect to height.  It is computed by dividing the weight in kilograms by the square of the height in meters, i.e., its unit is kilograms per meter squared, though the unit is usually omitted.  There are numerous BMI calculators (e.g., here) that people can use to figure out their BMI without doing any arithmetic.

Excerpts from an online survey of 25,000 individuals in 45 countries (Jan. 30, 2007):