Item — HN Reader

So that's why everyone seems to recognize me.

That makes sense though. The more closely faces represent the golden ratio, the more attractive they're judged to be. Therefore, the more similar they are in that aspect, the more attractive they are. So there are a lot more ways to be ugly that there are to be attractive.

That's interesting because familiarity also increases attractiveness, which is why 'unattractive' people (think actors) might be judged somewhat attractive despite their unattractive features...which in turn make them more memorable, thus more attractive.

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> The more closely faces represent the golden ratio, the more attractive they're judged to be.

Citation needed. The number of bogus references to the aesthetic power of the Golden Ratio is astonishing, most of them turn out to be false.

Online searches reveal the some articles claiming a relation between facial beauty and the Golden Ratio do so by simply redefining the Golden Ratio to equal any number that test subjects choose as most aesthetically pleasing:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2814183/

Quote: "We found that although different faces have varying attractiveness, individual attractiveness is optimized when the face’s vertical distance between the eyes and the mouth is approximately 36% of its length, and the horizontal distance between the eyes is approximately 46% of the face’s width. These “new” golden ratios match those of an average face."

Ah -- "new" Golden Ratios. How convenient, and how utterly unlike the real Golden Ratio, 1.618.... I caution my readers that the authors of the linked paper are social psychologists, a field with only a superficial connection to the world of science.

Watch out for the fibonacci flim-flam http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/pseudo/fibonacc.htm