The pursuit of beauty may be the yearning for the Golden Mean.
From Looking Good in the Washington Post
Picture the ratio in its simplest form: two lines. The first line is an inch long, and the second approximately 1.618 inches. (The exact length of the second line is called phi, and like its more famous cousin pi, it goes on endlessly after the decimal point.) The ratio of these two lines, 1 to 1.618, is the Golden Mean.
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Marquardt still takes delight in his own discovery that the combined width of the two upper front teeth in a model-perfect smile is 1.618 times the height of each tooth. Eventually, he decided to use phi to build a template for the perfect face. With a computer, he generated a number of shapes using key facial features (pupils, corners of the mouth, bridge of the nose, etc.) as endpoints. The triangles, pentagons and decagons that resulted were all based on the 1:1.618 ratio. Putting that all together, he created a "mask" of ideal beauty. He called the finished product his "beauty mask" or "phi mask."
The real test came when he assembled hundreds of pictures of acclaimed beauties, from today's superstars back in time to Nefertiti herself. His "mask" fit with uncanny precision onto face after face after face -- white, black, Asian, Hispanic, ancient, contemporary. In the distances from jaw to brow, from lip to nostril, from nose to eye socket and so on and so forth, he found, again and again, that magic ratio.
"We believe that it is not strictly an image of 'beauty,'" Marquardt explains on his Web site, "but actually an image of humanness."
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If today's Americans are uniquely obsessed, it's not with beauty, but with youth.
It's the inability to deal with reality and our aging bodies.