Eternal Beauty vs. Style – Marquardt vs. Fashion
6 Dec 2004
Today’s quote helps us understand beauty.
Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.
This quote reminds me of an interesting story from the BBC TV show “The Human Face.” In one segment they juxtaposition a fashion magazine editor’s ideas of beauty with a plastic surgeon’s. The editor talks about this year’s look, the lips that they are looking for, what is hot now. The surgeon offers a mask based on mathematics of the perfectly beautiful face.
The surgeon, Dr. Stephen Marquardt, developed the mask while trying to figure out why some of his surgeries didn’t make his patients more beautiful. The mask is just a transparency that shows the structure of a beautiful face.
In the show he places the transparency over pictures of all kinds of beautiful people and it always lines up. Men women, caucasian, black, asian, doesn’t matter.
The mask is based on the mathematical ratio of 1:1.618, otherwise known as phi or the golden ratio. I think this is the eternal part that Godard refers to. Understanding the relative element is how the magazine editor makes her living.
Want to know how beautiful you are? You can download one of these masks at http://www.beautyanalysis.com/mba_reposefrontalmaskapplication_page.htm.