By popular demand, today we’re analysing a very unconventionally attractive and polarising
face to highlight the importance of overall facial harmony instead of simply having top
tier features.
A few things first: We’re almost at 100k and we will be doing a proper giveaway.This
is a mini episode, but there will be more videos this week and lastly the QOVEs facial
report service will be launching once the 100k video comes out later this week.
We have one of my favourite actors, and one of the most unique faces on netflix, Cillian
Murphy.
I’m on the side that considers him to be conventionally handsome but there are others
who don’t like his face and consider it froglike.
In defining beauty ep. 2 I talked at length about the importance of the eye area and Cillian
is a grade A example of how a dissonant eye area can affect your face.
But before that we have to work from the bottom up.
He has an incredibly wide face and blocky face, there’s nothing wrong with that and
research does show that’s ideal in men.
His bigonial width is as you’d expect, also well above average and is almost 1:1 with
his bizygomatic width and bitemporal width.
In facial aesthetics recommendations by Naini Et al 2008, this jaw width should actually
be 70% of the cheekbone width.
In most men this creates a tapering effect and makes the face appear vertically longer
which is unideal.
On Cillian however, this lack of verticality compresses his lower third into a smaller,
wider area meaning that a large proportion of his face is just jaw.
This is best seen from a frontal view where its clear his jaw has a lower inclination,
more perpendicular gonial angle and longer mandible length.
This makes him seem hyper masculine and is a turn off to a proportion of the population
because he sits so far from average on the sexual dimorphism scale by lower third proportion
alone.
If we follow the jaw guidelines created by Mommaerts 2016, his face does not fall into
proportion, especially his eyes which don’t meet up with a line drawn parallel to the
jaw.
Essentially what it’s saying is that to be proportionate, Cillian’s eyes need to
be wider.
This is interesting because visually its not something you’d be able to pinpoint but
you get that feeling that there’s something off about his face, even if ever so slightly
or maybe its just me.
So we’ve established he has a very strong jaw.
The issue is the rest of his face is feminine which gives him his polarising look.
He has incredibly highset and prominent cheekbones which makes his face appear more gaunt than
it already is.
Pair that with a large distance between the gonion and zygoma and wide bigonial length
and you get his characteristically hollow cheeks.
In fact he has the same hollow cheeked look as most high fashion female models like Bella
Hadid, which is why it adds to his contrasting look.
The last and most defining feature of Cillian are his eyes or more correctly his periocular
region.
Some find them buggy and protruded and the main reason for that is because he has larger
orbital rims than the average person with that kind of bone structure.
This is a tricky concept, but essentially we can argue that his jaw is in the upper
10% of men.
It’s great, it’s unique and it’d likely be model tier.
The average person with this kind of bigonial width, jaw inclination, gonial angle and defined
cheekbones, is modelling alongside Jordan Barret.
However, these models also have very deep set, wide eyes with a prominent brow bone
and low orbital size.
Cillian is the exception to this group of men, being the complete opposite from the
nose upwards.
He has very large orbital openings, leading to larger and consequently rounded eyes.
Pair that with his long eyelashes and middle parted hair and it becomes clearer why people
have a love hate relationship with his look.
His features sit on both ends of the sexual dimorphism extremes.
Its a contrast that I’ve yet to see, and honestly no one else comes to mind.
A lot of Cillian’s appeal comes from his onscreen roles.
Every video I touch a little about how looks influence how people perceive you and Cillian
is a great example of it.
In Batman Begins, Cillian looked unremarkable.
His face had a lot of youthful facial fat and made his wide face look even wider as
if a bee had stung him or a botched plastic surgery had taken place.
You wouldn’t trust this feminine pretty boy Cillian to have the same cunning and wisdom
a war hardened Tommy Shelby would have in Peaky Blinders.
With age Cillian lost a lot of that facial fat exposing the dichotomy in his features.
His lean features disarm you because you likely haven’t seen someone like him before.
His face has always had a lot of ‘softness’ to it.
Not softness as in soft tissue or fat, but in the abstract terms defined by David Kibbe’s
Metamorphosis.
Tommy Shelby in the show doesn’t have the same masculinity in both appearance and behaviour
as his brother Arthur Shelby.
In fact they look nothing alike (obviously).
For those of you who haven’t watched the show does Cillian seem like the brain or the
brawn of the operation?
How can we tell and why do we think like that?
As the field of cognitive psychology would find it we make perceptions of people by the
way they present themselves and their facial features.
If they look hyper masculine like Arthur we correlate those features to be a result of
greater testosterone and expect them to act aggressively accordingly.
If they have baby faced, feminine features like John, the other brother, then they’re
more passive and neotenized, and if they have an ambiguous mix of both like Tommy, well,
then they’re the most dangerous because they’re impossible to read.
There’s nothing wrong with not having the perfect set of everything.
Most regularly attractive people, the type you’d see on the street, have one striking
feature and the remainder are quite plain.
The more polarising your features are, the more infatuated your admirers are to your
look.
So maybe its not a bad thing to be unconventionally attractive.