Beauty and the beastly business of quantifying it

The speed and temporary nature of social media feeds lead to some interesting contrasts.

In my Facebook newsfeed yesterday, I first took note of a Design Taxi link posted by Marc from Osocio about "The World’s Scientifically Most Beautiful Woman".

Here she is:

18-year-old student Florence Colgate has the most naturally perfect face, according to a British lifestyle show's nationwide search.

“Florence has all the classic signs of beauty,” Carmen Lefèvre, of The Perception Lab at the University of St Andrews’ School of Psychology, told The Daily Mail. “She has large eyes, high cheekbones, full lips and a fair complexion. Symmetry appears to be a very important cue to attractiveness.”

Along with — apparently — blonde hair, blue eyes and light, unblemished skin.

I won't even get into the Nordicism of all this. (The Mail actually called her "'Britain's most beautiful face".) There have been enough blogposts about that issue already. I'm more interested in the parts that sociobiologists have tried to rationalize.

For example, symmetry is seen as a sign of good genes and good health. Maladaptive mutations, as well as childhood disease and injury, can affect symmetry. It's seen as a way to advertise good health and disease resistance — in other words, that person is a good source of healthy babies.

The other features are ethnically specific. Blonde hair and big blue eyes are what are known as "neoteny" — that is, babylike features kept into adulthood. All humans are very neotenic apes, retaining our round-headed juvenile chimp features throughout our lives.

Via pbase

The loss of pigment that gave northern people lighter skin is also an adaptive mutation to absorb more vitamin D from less sun exposure. I personally believe that lightening of skin and eyes in parts of those populations came along for the ride, then got amplified by sexual selection because youth is attractive.

But Darwin I ain't.

The other link I was going to mention was actually directly above Marc's "beauty" link. It was a CBC story titled, "Ugly Meter app worries cyber bullying activists"

A smartphone app allows users to assess their own symmetry based on some unknown standards. It's like "Hot or Not", but without the subjectivity of human feedback.

According to uglymeter.net:

"How ugly are you? For over 3 million users, Ugly Meter has been the go-to iPhone App that won’t lie when it comes to determining how attractive or ugly you are. Just snap a picture of yourself (or someone else) in the app and hit the scan button. The Ugly Meter will scan your face and determine just how ugly you are and dispense advice accordingly. Ugly Meter then allows you to post the results to Facebook or Twitter."

I wonder about the ethnic standards of beauty behind this, too. Although my own northern Euro ancestry doesn't seem to have helped much:

I blame the lighting.

I tried a few more times, and found that the insults got pretty creative.

To test the baseline, I tried scanning a screenshot of Miss Colgate:

Clearly, the creators of this app and the people behind the British talent search read the same books. Or something.

But then what happens when I scan a head-on glamour pic of Iman, a woman so ethereally beautiful, she got David Bowie to settle down:

I must have held the camera funny. I'll try again:

Ummm...

But hey, there was nothing scientific about this (mostly because I don't have all day to fart around with my iPhone). If you don't mind giving them your 99¢, you can find out for yourself what "beautiful" really means.

(I'll update this post with more scans, as I get a chance.)

Adriana Lima

Grace Park

George Clooney (a reader request by Rachel)

Barbie

Sometimes, it just seems random. Watch what happens when I scanned the face of late-'70s David Bowie, two different times.

Was it the misplaced cursor that made all the difference? (Good thing I didn't shoot him in full Aladdin Sane makeup.)

"Fashion Shack" local ad may be the sketchiest ever

twentytwowords.com shared this insanely bad ad from 2010, featuring a really creepy voiceover, hypnotic music, and a group of young women who I fear may never have been heard from again.



The Fashion Shack is based in South Carolina (hence the "y'alls"). Y'ikes.

The Sexiest Vegetarian Next Door

PETA is finally getting around to addressing the most important issue yet in animal welfare: Who are the sexiest non-celebrity vegetarians willing to objectify themselves for the cause?

Will it be Stephanie of Roseville, CA, who (in addition to the fact that she is naked) would like you to know, "There is an unfiltered kindness and love in an animals eyes that you just can't find in a persons" (sic)?

Or Erika of Greenville, SC, who riddles us this: "If you love animals called pets, why do you eat animals called dinner?"

There are men in the running as well.

Zachary of Brooklyn, NY, who seems to have a hard time keeping his underpants up, says "No animals were harmed in the making of this body."

Malik of Pembroke Pines, FL, says "Animals have a place in my heart, not in my stomach".

You only have two weeks left to vote for the two winners, who will then be sent to Hawaii together to  prove how much sex vegetarians can have. (Presuming they're both straight. But I don't want to promote any stereotypes here...)

See all the contestants at the PETA site.

Interestingly, the women outnumber the men by more than 5:1.

Someone is actually trying to patent a bra purse

This Kickstarter project states:

"We have all fallen victim to the pocketless dresses and even the dress pants with fake pockets. However, Kyle and Mariah, two students at the University of Washington, decided to create a way to give women options, free their hands, and let them party without worrying about a purse getting stolen."

I kind of get it, as a secret stash for mad money. But how practical is this thing when the bouncer asks the woman for ID and she starts unbuttoning her shirt? (Although it would probably get her on the guest list along with a backstage pass.)

And how exactly is she supposed to answer each one of the 20 texts per hour that the average young woman receives*?

As of this posting, they have raised $3,235 of their $4,000 goal, with 19 days to go. So I guess this thing may make it to market. In which case, we may have to rebrand the "booty call" to an entirely different set of anatomy.

* I pulled this fake stat out of my ass

Tip via Buzzfeed

Lou Ferrigno's bizarre viral for Online Schools

This video will teach you two things:

1) WOW players like to date each other; and

2) Why Lou Ferrigno was always overdubbed.

(As a kid, I thought that was an accent. Turns out Lou is just very hard of hearing. And weird as hell.)

+

For those of you too young to remember (meaning almost the entire target market of this "PSA"), Lou played The Incredible Hulk in the eponymous '70s TV series. After that, he played a badly-dubbed Hercules in a number of Italian films.

In conclusion, I have no idea what this has to do with Online Schools. But I shared it, so there's that.

Wendy's Canada "poutitions" parliament to recognize our national dish

Update: Wendy's e-mailed me with the following:

"Thank you for mentioning the Wendy’s Poutition in your latest blog post. We just wanted to clarify that we have yet to reach our goal of 100,000  signatures (we’re at 2,465 as of today)."

Which confused the hell out of me, because the "progress" graphic said they had reached their goal. (Turns out its the default screen you get if you try to look at the "poutition" without "liking" the page first.)

Anyway, if you want to pitch for poutine, you still have a chance...

That's right. The goopy, seems-like-a-great-idea-after-last-call, mix of fries gravy and curd cheese that Quebec gave Canadians everywhere: Poutine.

In a pretty clever Facebook promotion, Wendy's Canada is asking Canadians to "like" its page and sign the "poutition". If they get 100,000 clicktivists, they say they'll officially submit it to Parliament for consideration.

And they've apparently made it.

I assume the Opposition NDP will support the motion, seeing as they have so much support in poutine's homeland of Quebec. And the majority Conservatives, who were mostly shut out of seats in Quebec, and are still looking to make in-roads to the major Ontario urban centres where poutine is popular, will find this issue worth considering. (The third-party Liberals, in honour of long-serving Prime Minister Jean Poutine, will likely vote on party lines.)

The idea of making a classic Quebec comfort food Canada's "national" dish is likely to cause some controversy, however. First of all because it is already a "national" dish in the nation-within-a-nation that is Quebec. Second, many Westerners have yet to be converted to the ultimate junk food.

But I think it's a nice way to acknowledge that most great Canadian cultural icons come from Quebec: jazz legend Oscar Peterson, Oscar-winning Director Denys Arcand, Captain of the Goddamn Starship Enterprise William Shatner, Celine D-...  Did I mention the Captain of the Goddamn Starship Enterprise?

Even Wendy's has seen fit to make this an opportunity for the "Rest of Canada" to make Quebec feel more loved, even going so far as to parody the federalist slogan "My Canada Includes Quebec".

Vulva jewellery? So that happened. #FdAdFriday

The Onion's AV Club has this to say about Grimes' (Claire Boucher's) new line of rings cast in realistic vulva shapes:

"Boucher's latest side project is a new line of jewelry produced with sculptor Morgan Black, the first product of which are the below "pussy rings." They are rings that look like vulvas. You wear them to declare your feminism, or your post-feminism, or your belief that feminism is a weak, old-fashioned construct embraced by those who don't have the vulvas to wear them right out on their fingers, which is fun or something. Or whatever."

Indeed.