Psychologists and anthropologists have long tried to nail down what makes us perceive one face as beautiful and another not. There are theories about the math of it, the "Golden Ratio"-how, if you take careful measurements of the lines and triangles formed by a beautiful face, they will add up to the same proportions first noted by the Greeks to be aesthetically pleasing. More recently, a scientist named Michael Cunningham took it upon himself to study the faces of 50 women, half of whom were finalists in an international beauty pageant. In "Measuring the Physical in Physical Attractiveness" (italics mine), he wrote that the width of an eye, if it is to be part of a beautiful face, should be precisely three-tenths the width of the face, and the chin ought to be just one-fifth the height of the face, while the total area of the nose had better be less than 5 percent of the total area of the face!
In the end, the science of beauty seems to point to a few general parameters: We tend to like large eyes, high cheekbones, a small nose, a large smile, and a small chin. What the scientific literature doesn't mention is that we like it all to be as young as possible. This wasn't always the case. The Gibson Girl ideal of the early twentieth century, writes Daniel Delis Hill in Advertising to the American Woman, had the features of a mature, fully formed woman: "heavy lidded eyes accented with thick lashes; fine, high eyebrows, pronounced cheekbones and firm jawlines." In the forties and fifties, the most successful models of the day-Dovima, Lisa Fonssagrives, Suzy Parker-were elegant, haughty, aristocratic, especially when photographed by Irving Penn or Richard Avedon. The sixties and seventies brought a sea change that created a younger beauty ideal, but the aesthetic was more casual than adolescent.
But in the last ten years, perhaps with the coming of Britney Spears, the age of the ideal has dropped precipitously. Now both fashion and celebrity magazines are filled with images of teenagers-whether they're Eastern European models or tanned California reality stars. Their faces are plump and dewy and flushed with youth. As thin as their bodies are, they still haven't entirely shed the baby fat in their faces. This, it seems, is what women in their forties and fifties are now after: baby fat.
It's impossible to pinpoint exactly when or how a new aesthetic is born, but it seems clear that once we became obsessed with the baby face of the teenage girl, the world of dermatology came up with more and better ways for us to achieve the plumpness of youth. We've moved way beyond simply injecting bovine collagen into our lips. Today there's a dizzying nanotechnological world of hyaluronic acid and collagen fillers-Zyplast, Cosmoderm, Perlane, Juvéderm, Evolence, Sculptra-each with a different "bead" size targeted to fill every wrinkle on the face (microscopic for the lines around the eyes, heavier gauge for a cheek or nasolabial fold). With these tools, a woman can dramatically alter her face without going anywhere near a surgeon's office. All that's required are twice-a-year injection appointments with an aesthetic surgeon.
