ca. 8 minutes reading time
In another post I've talked a bit about the types of square jaws I like. I wasn't clear about what proportions I'm searching for and I also shared pictures of very distinct faces, making it even harder to understand what I was talking about. To be frank, didn't really know what I was taking about myself. I will try to clarify what I now propose to be officially the definition of a round face.
An example of a 'round' face, with a lot of footage for reference, is the face of Audrey Hepburn.
Background Info:
Our brain interprets information in a certain way, because of how it evolved. Our eyes can already see almost perfectly when we are born, but we cannot interpret what we see, because our brain has yet to learn what we are looking at. The more objects we look at, the better we get at interpreting them. This sadly also means we never come even near our potential of understanding what we see, because we lack time and intelligence. Our brains tried interpreting the environment through very crappy visual cortexes long before we had real eyes. Our genes don't seem to have a clear mechanism to tell how far the organism is in understanding its environment and how complex the environment is. This means our genes try to hard code some variables to help us interpret what we see. The objects which are most certainly important to recognize share attributes with babies, faces of various species, reflect sunlight and are round. These variables allow us to understand certain objects better. These objects are automatically more beautiful to us. The more attributes a person understands an object to have, the more attributes of the object can be pleasing and meaningful to the person.
The same variables might hinder us from understanding more complex objects, which might do more harm than good to understand, such as dead faces or asymmetric face-like patterns that are everywhere. Our brain makes us feel uncomfortable or confused when looking at such objects, because it actively tries not to understand things which are misleading, too complicated or meaningless.
These variables of course contain only very little information compared to all the information we collect throughout our lives. But since they are there from the start, they likely tell us what to look out for in the first place and help us structure all the incoming data. This might require for parts of the initial variables to be strongly prioritized throughout our lives.
Looks might have gotten more important than functionality over time when it comes to faces, since good looking people are generally thought of as kinder, more intelligent and just better in any way. At the same time we are apex predators, which mostly rely on each other, so pleasing the brains of tribe members is more important than pleasing the rest of the environment.
Round objects are far easier to interpret than objects with edges. No matter from what side you see the round object, it will look roughly the same, the moon, the sun, babies, boobs, ass, etc. With edges, no matter the angle, a brain has to interpret what the edges mean, if their assumed position is corresponding to reality or where they should be in a well functioning human. Some edges have an effect on how the light falls, others don't.
To me, this suggests the female face with the highest success rate is as easy to understand as possible and therefore as simplistic as possible.
Popularity of simplistic faces:
1. An observation I've made is that in many films, the female lead has a wider or bigger jaw than any female rival, making the face look more simplistic. A few examples for this from films I know of:
Adaptation 2003 (Cara Seymour), Kingsman: The Secret Service 2014 (Sophie Cookson), The three musketeers 2011 (Gabriella Wilde), Johnny English Reborn 2011 (Rosamund Pike), Three Wishes for Cinderella 1973 (Libuše Šafránková) Iron Man 2008 (Gwyneth Paltrow), Pride and Prejudice 1995 (Jennifer Ehle), Total Recall 2012 (Jessica Biel), Pride and Prejudice 1995 (Jennifer Ehle), Bride and Prejudice 2004 (Aishwarya Rai), Pride and Prejudice 2005 (Keira Knightley), Amuesement 2008 (Katheryn Winnick), The Cabin in the Woods 2011 (Kristen Connolly), Truth or Dare 2018 (Lucy Hale). ------------ I didn't pick films in which I'd have had to compare female main characters to clearly meant to be less attractive characters. Other films might have exceptions, but I can't list what I don't know of.
2. Different people can benefit from different styles, lighting, posture, etc. But only women with decent jaws can afford to have short hair while staying competitive in getting attention. Everybody else just starts looking like a goblin, trying to play it as a sign of self confidence.
3. Asian women seem to be perceived as more attractive than women from other races, when looking at stats from dating platforms. This might have other reasons than looks, e.g. only rich Asians emigrating, but it seems probable that looks play a role. Their face is easier to interpret and more child-like.
4. In animation, people draw simplistic shapes mainly because it's easier to interpret and not because it's easier to draw. We started out with real life humans, got weird with Bambi, went over to Japan and arrived at something that's barely human. The animation got this simplistic, because these are the types of faces parts of our brain really want to see. Disney does this to maximize profits, knowing more people would want to watch a film if heads are replaces with balls which have eyes painted on.
Conclusion:
Especially female faces likely mostly evolved to please the parameters of our brains throughout the later stages of our evolution. Therefore faces can only look as if they were healthy up to a certain point anyways. More complex faces might have the disadvantage that they'd be confused with background noise, predators or in some cases even corpses. We should take the best of what's natural and the best of what's apparently pleasing to the human brain and work with that.
Examples:
The square jawed round face:
- As a rule of thumb, a round face will look clearly attractive, even without hair surrounding it, since our visual cortex will recognize it instantly without having the additional information of what gender, what status and what rough age a person is expected to be.
- A round face isn't round because it has a round shape from a certain angle. The word 'round' rather describes the aggregate of all attributes of a face as somewhat round-ish, rather than e.g. hollow, bulky, pointy or flat. If you look at the face from a different angle, it still looks like the same entity, the same way a sphere looks the same from every angle. It is coherent.
- The word 'round' also describes that the necessary edges, like nose, lower jaw, chin and cheekbones, don't disrupt the balance of the face in any way. Healthy skin should have enough volume to dampen the clear lines which mere bones can draw onto a face. If it does not, it seems the bones are either too big for the face or the skin contains too little fat and water.
- The front half of the lower jaw is at an angle almost horizontal to the ground and almost vertical to the neck.
- The lower jaw is shaped in one single line from the end of the ramus to the chin.
- The jaw seems wide, meaning there must be a rather short distance between eyes and mouth and/or the eyes must be placed rather widely apart.
- From front and side view, the ramus is almost vertical to the ground.
- There should be little to no folds from the nose to the edges of the mouth, when the mouth is closed and relaxed. When the person smiles baring their upper teeth, one should see only a slight shadow on both sides of the upper jaw alongside the molars.
- Both upper and lower jaw should be visible through the skin, which is achieved through facial muscles, well distributed fascia, low body fat percentage and healthy bone mass.
- The lower jaw should have grown together completely.
- The eyelids should only barely be visible.
- Many faces which are narrow could have been much wider, if the woman had grown up more healthily. There are genetics which make faces grow rather narrow, but since it might be hard to know if somebody grew up healthily or not, it's easier to just ignore all narrow faces. This means very healthy women are getting excluded from consideration for unnatural standards nobody has any control over. That's ok.
- A round face cannot have underwent any plastic surgery or major jaw surgery.
- A round face should be rated without makeup, if possible.
If anybody finds any square jawed, round faced women, feel free to post them here. Not sure, though, if it's possible to outshine the common genetic freak, anorexic-type of square jaw this way.