Joined: 07 Feb 2007 {Posts: 1770 } Location: Lookin DC Metro, Feelin Geneva
Posted: Sun 11 Oct 2009 02:25 Post subject: Various Ethnic Facial Composites
I thought some on the site might find this interesting. For the past few months I've been playing around with software that allows me to average the faces of people. I've tried to find the average face of various ethnic groups. I try very hard to base it on what is known of actual demographics of a country or people. I do not use actors or actresses in the composites, once in awhile I will use athletes, but not too many, as they are usually more lean than normal and have more masculine features. I try not to use anyone under 16 or over 45. I use about 15-20 photos per composite. I've done a good bit of Europe, almost all of East and Southeast Asia, an Uzbeks, Mongolian, Saudi, Iraqi, Afghan, Iranian...I will put them up on my site later on. Some things I want to do I cannot. For example it is very hard to find pictures of Saudi females, for obvious religious reasons. Most nations in Africa have sparse pics on the internet, although I have South African blacks, and Ethiopians. I will do Nigerians eventually. If this post is allowed, I will edit this to add pictures of a Mexican Female and PR male in the next 24 hours.
Here are some examples:
Average Puerto Rican Male
Average Mexican Male
Average Spaniard
Average Spaniard Female
Average Englishman (I mean English, tried to avoid obvious Scot, Welsh, etc last names).
Average English Female
Average West African Male (from Senegal to Angola)
Average West African Female (same formulation as above)
Average African American Male (this one does contain some famous folks, but no models or anything, I need to redo it)
Average African American female
I broke my averages into groups and did subAverages of those: European, Central Asian + Middle East, Southeast And East Asia (without Chinese) + Sub-Sahara African, South Asian (Indian), and Chinese. That is a rough estimate of how the human population is divided...being their are 1 billion Chinese and 1 billion Indians. So I'm basically mixing everyone else, Aborigines, South Pacific, Native Americans (North and South America)...but in reality if you add all those left out they are not even half a billion people, because most humans live in Eurasia and then second is Africa. I'm not counting North and South America nonNative populations because they are are represented in the old world populations, they are just some mixture of those. If I added in the extra folks I mentioned, then I expect the eyes to look more "East Asian" and the skin to be slightly lighter.
Average Human Male (Missing Pacific Islanders and New World Natives)
Average Human Female (Missing Pacific Islanders and New World Natives)
Were any fugly people used to come up with the averages?? Because the averages, in my opinion, are more attractive than they really should be.
There has been some study of this phenomenon. The current hypothesis is that what we subconsciously perceive as a beautiful face, is precisely the average of all the faces that we saw in early childhood. Consequently, any time that you average a large number of faces, you wind up with a beautiful face.
Were any fugly people used to come up with the averages?? Because the averages, in my opinion, are more attractive than they really should be.
There has been some study of this phenomenon. The current hypothesis is that what we subconsciously perceive as a beautiful face, is precisely the average of all the faces that we saw in early childhood.
So if what we determine now to be beautiful is based on the averages of all the faces we saw in early childhood, would that mean that we find beauty in the average of looks of our own family. I say this since most people's early childhood was overwhelmingly filled with relatives. And if this be the case then what we find beautiful could be some kind of subconsciously incestuous attraction that we are acting on??
So if what we determine now to be beautiful is based on the averages of all the faces we saw in early childhood, would that mean that we find beauty in the average of looks of our own family? I say this since most people's early childhood was overwhelmingly filled with relatives. And if this be the case then what we find beautiful could be some kind of subconsciously incestuous attraction that we are acting on?
Well, this is far outside my area of expertise, so the short answer is "I do not know." But from what I have read, I would say "yes" and "yes." For details, see "The Instinctive Need to See “Otherness” in The Perception of “Racial” Traits, especially endnotes 13 through 16.
Being comfortable and perceiving beauty among those who look like your family is definitely a real phenomenon. I would not call it "incestuous" however. I think that our taxonomic family (Hominidae) is very much into faces and facial recognition, and it is for that very reason that we have such a strong revulsion to incest (which would propagate lethal recessive alleles).
Joined: 07 Feb 2007 {Posts: 1770 } Location: Lookin DC Metro, Feelin Geneva
Posted: Thu 15 Oct 2009 19:28 Post subject:
fwsweet wrote:
onlyhuman77 wrote:
Were any fugly people used to come up with the averages?? Because the averages, in my opinion, are more attractive than they really should be.
There has been some study of this phenomenon. The current hypothesis is that what we subconsciously perceive as a beautiful face, is precisely the average of all the faces that we saw in early childhood. Consequently, any time that you average a large number of faces, you wind up with a beautiful face.
Yes this is what I found, beauty may be a cultural designation, but I would say attractive, the reason is the average face tends to be symmetric.
To answer Only's question, yes, I used people who would be considered unattractive, believe it or not 3 or 4 or more of those people out of 15 or so pictures does not drastically affect the average. What we consider ugly is usually asymmetrical and extreme features (like a nose that is too long, lips way too big for the face) when you average the photos it gets rid of the extremes.
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