Translator: Louise-Marie Six Reviewer: Eman Salah El-Din
Okay, by a show of hands,
how many people are attracted to beautiful people?
Come on, be honest.
Okay, and again, by a show of hands,
how many people would self-declare: "I am beautiful"?
Okay.
So, this is a funny ratio, right?
Because we're all looking for them, and they ain't in the house.
(Laughter)
Now, I bet when I said "beautiful,"
you thought about your face. Right?
So there is some kind of inextricable link
between the concept of beauty and the physical structure of our face.
And I am going to tell you how that comes to be,
and why being beautiful is so critically important.
We are literally hardwired to recognize beauty.
From the moment we enter this planet,
we are trying to connect to the people around us.
There is a place in our brain that is designed to respond
when an individual looks at a face.
The neurons in this area respond only to a face.
So, imagine this: you've got a brain.
It's responsible for connecting you to the entire world,
controlling all body functions,
and yet, in this terribly precious real estate,
there is allocated a region whose sole purpose
is for the neurons to fire when the individual looks at a face.
Because the brain is always evolving,
we know that that means facial recognition must be essential for our survival.
And this turns out to be the case.
13 years after he published "Origin of the Species,"
Charles Darwin published this book.
It is called "The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals."
And in it, there were two hypotheses he put forth.
The first is that facial gestures are required
for us to establish social connections.
And the second was that it is conserved between men and animals
how we use those facial gestures to express emotion.
So, you can look at the boy and the dog, and you know that they are both fearful.
Right?
So, Darwin put it this way:
"The welfare of mankind depends upon
the expression and recognition of emotion."
Now, if you don't believe Darwin,
think about any infant and an adult.
We spend an inordinate amount of time
teaching children about these facial gestures.
And think about children who don't do well at this task.
They are later oftentimes diagnosed with conditions like autism,
which have as their hallmark an inability to connect with people.
The face, because of this focus, becomes central to our identity.
So if you ask a child: "Draw a human being,"
this is what you'll get: a lollipop with a face.
Right?
Children book illustrators recognize this point as well.
Everything that they want to have an emotional connection to,
they put a face on it.
The sun has a face,
the moon has a face,
Thomas the train has a face, right?
And that's how you build an emotional connection
between the child and their world.
Now, the face is not just a means for communication.
It's also an advertisement for our health, our vitality, and our youth.
And you can imagine where a better-looking, healthy person
becomes maybe better mate material.
Now, a lot of people have asked me, "Can you define 'beauty'?"
Maybe you have heard of something called the "golden ratio."
This is an ancient concept.
The mathematician Pythagoras, when he wasn't fiddling around
with those triangles that he spent so much time on,
(Laughter)
he spent time studying the golden ratio,
because it was thought to yield beautiful, harmonious proportions
in all kinds of objects.
And there are people that would have you believe
that you could define beauty by this golden ratio.
But I assure you, this is an example of trying to cram some dubious data
into a mathematical framework.
What we do know about attractiveness or beauty
is that the hallmarks that cross all ages and all ethnic groups
are that symmetry and a balance in proportion is essential.
So, when I talk about this, I want to give you an example.
This might surprise you:
that most people, when they look at a beautiful face,
it tends to be the most average-looking face.
I'll give you this example:
this is a scientific study that was done a number of years ago, it's been repeated,
where scientists collected hundreds of images
of women from one country, let's say France.
And they superimposed those images to create a composite or an average
of that person's face.
And then they took Miss Average-Face France
and they merged it with Miss Average-Face Korea
and Italy, and Ethiopia, and all of the different countries,
to create a Miss Average-Face World.
And now, here is the interesting part.
Regardless of the ethnic background of the people being asked,
Miss Average-Face World
was always considered more attractive than the components.
Now, I find that very surprising.
Because usually, when you're told you're average-looking,
that ain't a compliment.
But here, you see, it really is true.
It isn't the first time that experiment was done.
In fact, the experiment was done first,
or written up in the scientific literature first,
by a fellow who is actually a cousin of Charles Darwin.
This was in 1879.
And, okay, he didn't have a computer to generate a morph of the faces,
but the way that he derived the composite faces
wasn't nearly as interesting as the results.
And what he reported was that it was unanimously agreed
by everybody that looked at these faces
that the composite was always more attractive
than the individual components.
Now, Galton didn't stop there.
He also thought that perhaps the face was a predictor of health status.
And here are two illustrations of composite faces
and how disease, a wasting disease, affected the portraiture of these faces.
On the left-hand side is a composite of people affected with syphilis,
and on the right-hand side, gout.
Now, this relationship that disease causes
a loss in balance or imbalances and a loss in symmetry,
this relationship is still used today,
by geneticists who look for facial differences
to predict underlying diseases.
One of the great geneticists of the 20th century
was one of my professors.
And these people --
it's not a matter that their faces didn't fit a golden ratio.
The children that they were looking at,
oftentimes they had to pinpoint very subtle differences in their faces
that were predictive of underlying disease.
So, let's test your predictive powers. Here.
What do you see that looks different on this cute little fellow on the left?
Anything?
Eyes. That's right, the eyes are just a little bit far apart.
Now, here is this little boy's hand. Do you notice how the fingers are?
This little boy has a very rare genetic condition
called Greig cephalopolysyndactyly.
Now, let's try it again.
What do you see here?
Come on, you guys.
Okay, bumps. There are little bumps on the face.
And the eyes are a little bit further apart.
Now, here is a side view of the same young girl.
Anything?
The chin.
That's right. The forehead is protruding, the head is a little large,
the chin is a little small.
This young girl has a condition called Gorlin syndrome,
which actually was named after my professor that I was just mentioning,
Robert Gorlin.
Now, here is the important thing.
Individuals who have this syndrome, Gorlin syndrome,
develop an unusually high predilection for skin cancers.
So now you can understand that if you had a better perception,
more carefully could scrutinize the face
and understand what was different about it,
that might lead to an earlier diagnosis and perhaps better prevention
of other conditions that this child might suffer from.
But Galton didn't stop there.
He had at his disposal hundreds of photographs of criminals,
and he started to formulate a new hypothesis.
And this one was that the face was somehow a predictor of one's moral character.
This idea caught on really rapidly, and all too quickly,
there were a lot of people who thought it was a very good idea indeed
if we could identify people who, by their appearance alone,
may be likely to commit a crime.
So you can see that this is going in a bad direction.
Galton bemoaned the fact
that they didn't have accurate measurements
of the faces of Englishmen from past generations,
because then, they could have compared class with class,
and figured out whether England was deteriorating or improving.
So it goes like this:
if you look different on the outside,
you must be different on the inside,
and "different" equals "diseased."
And not just physically diseased, but morally diseased.
Suffering of facial disfigurement has a profound effect on the individual,
not only on how they feel about themselves,
but on how others respond to them.
And so, are we to heap on top of that
a question about their ethical shortcoming?
This is a phrase from a Swiss clergyman:
"The morally best, the most beautiful,
the morally worst, the most deformed."
If you think that's a relic of some long-ago prejudice,
you're wrong.
Here is a phrase we use today: "He is as ugly as sin."
Right?
So, let me introduce you to this man.
His name is James Partridge.
In this picture, he is 18 years old, heading off to Oxford,
and he didn't make it,
because his car that he was driving in crashed.
The care caught fire, and he escaped, but just.
Here is a picture of him shortly thereafter,
when he was in the hospital.
He underwent repeated reconstructive surgeries for five years.
After that, he said, "It's no longer a medical issue,
this is an emotional and a social issue.
I had to learn how to walk down the street."
James formed an organization in London. It is called "Changing Faces."
And it serves to help others with facial differences
learn how to cope with those differences,
and it also lobbies on behalf of those who faced inequities
simply because of the way they look.
And here I have to stop and tell you -
I have to confess that when I was asked to give this talk,
I thought, "Why me?"
And I wrote down an answer.
And it might not be a good answer, but this is what I wrote:
"I am no great or rare beauty,
but in the genetic lottery of life,
through no credit to myself,
I got handed an attractive face.
And there are those, through no fault of their own,
who are not so lucky.
And I have witnessed with my own eyes
those children, who, when they become aware of their differences,
begin to turn inward.
And their great limitless potential fades.
And I am anguished.
So, this is a call. This is a call to action.
We are supposed to go above and beyond our hardwiring.
There is such a thing called neuroplasticity, right?
So, the next time we see somebody who looks different,
let's not look away.
Let's look them in the eye to use this face to communicate
our love and our compassion.
Let's hit the override button.
Let's decide beauty is not determined by any golden ratio.
It is determined by the kindness, the compassion,
the warmth inside of someone,
the ability to face adversity and overcome it.
And I hope this guides you on a journey
that will lead you to understand that inner beauty.
(Applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)