What The Average Woman's Face Looks Like In 41 Countries
Have you ever wondered what the average woman looks like in a different country? Thanks to science, now you can.
Alberto Menendez Cervero/ Shutterstock The last way you'd ever want to be described is "average." Average is blah; it's worse than ugly or unattractive because being average implies being boring and uninteresting. No one remembers average, and you're certainly not gonna get a cute guy's number by being remembered as "Plain Jane."
We all want to be special, unique, and stand out in some way, whether it's how we look or the clothes that we wear.
However, if you went by the average face created by scientists who, in 2013, blended thousands of faces together, you might change your thinking about being called average. Average, it turns out, is stunning, hot, and gorgeous, and makes me seriously question how I look.
By using a special computer program, scientists put hundreds of pictures of women's faces (centered around the eyes) and created an average face for a variety of countries.
What the average woman's face looks like in 41 countries
This face-averaging tool was used by University of Glasgow psychologists to study perceptions of beauty and see how the average woman would look from those descriptions.
The technique of superimposing multiple photographs was first developed by Sir Francis Galton in the late 1880s.
His method, called composite portraiture, used photographs of different subjects, combining them through repeated limited exposure to produce one single blended image.
While it's fantastic that the average is stunningly beautiful in every country, there's been some controversy, as these aren't representative of what actual average women look like. All these women look super young and like they have some kind of makeup on, not at all what an average woman anywhere looks like.
The program rules out any blemishes and all these women appear to be in their early twenties — hardly the average age of any country, and they all seem to have perfect mouths and eyebrows as well.
The Face Research Lab says, "We use sophisticated computer graphics to manipulate faces in order to test people's preferences for different characteristics using two methods for manipulating faces: prototyping and transforming."
South African photographer Mike Mike's web project, The Face of Tomorrow, was said to be the inspiration for the facial study.
All photos: The Daily Mail
Though there's no average for North America and the United States, we can only assume it's because Americans look so vastly different that creating an average of everyone might look similar to Wal-Mart shoppers.
But no one is really average, as every woman has something that makes her beautiful, and no woman should compare her looks to another woman, especially one created by a computer.
Christine Schoenwald is a writer, performer, and frequent contributor to YourTango. She's had articles featured in The Los Angeles Times, Salon, Bustle, Medium, Huffington Post, Business Insider, and Woman's Day, among many others.