How Celebrity Faces Would Look if They Fit the Golden Ratio

• AUTHOR: MARGARET RHODES.MARGARET RHODES

THESE CELEBRITIES ARE not victims of botched plastic surgeries. Rather, they have been disfigured by the golden ratio—the geometric sequence believed to hold the key to beauty in design, art, and nature.

The golden ratio between a pair of objects was first defined by Euclid over 2,000 years ago as equal to the ratio of their sum to the bigger of the two quantities. That ratio value is 1.618, or phi. Art lore has it that Leonardo da Vinci used the ratio when painting the Mona Lisa, and that Salvador Dalì applied it to The Sacrament of the Last Supper. Architecture mythology states that Le Corbusier translated the proportions in his work, notably when designing the UN Secretariat Building in New York. And most recently, rumor had it the Apple logo was designed in accordance with the divine proportions. In all cases, the thinking goes: When these proportions are applied to a design’s structure, the outcome is pleasing to the human eye. Some have even contended that the rule applies to human faces. Igor Kochmala, a Moscow-based web designer, illustrates the fallacy of that opinion with his golden retouching of Hollywood icons.

Click to Open Overlay Gallery

 IGOR KOCHMALA

Kochmala’s celebrity retouchings—all, it should be noted, of white men—try out a handful of golden-ratio configurations, and they all yield droopy versions of famous mugs. The results remind us of a recent photo essay by photographer Alex John Beck, applies another widely held principle about human beauty—perfect symmetry—in order to debunk it, creating uncanny, alien-looking visages, instead of more appealing faces.

Kochmala’s project is only the most recent setback for the golden ratio, whose mythology was deconstructed in posts by Co.Design’s John Brownlee and Stanford’sKeith Devlin. Both detail the folly in retroactively applying the golden ratio to existing works of art, and of leaning on the math as a means of making a design resonate with users.

The lesson: There are no surefire formulas in beauty or good design.

http://www.wired.com/2015/06/celebrities-go-golden-ratios-knife/