What is a golden ratio face, and is it real?

Where the idea comes from

Marquardt’s mask, US patent 5,659,625

The best-known golden face is a patent. Stephen R. Marquardt’s US patent 5,659,625, “Method and apparatus for analyzing facial configurations and components,” was filed on 23 May 1994 (with priority back to 4 June 1992) and granted on 19 August 1997.

It is built from pentagons. The abstract describes “overlay systems which define a face, in frontal and lateral views, which are comprised of mathematically inter-related pentagons and parts of those pentagons and which establish a reference system to analyze human faces for surgical, cosmetic, and identification purposes”. Pentagons are where the golden ratio lives: a regular pentagon’s diagonal is φ = 1.618 times its side. The patent spells it out: “the greek letter Phi represents the "golden proportion"”.

So the mask is a design choice, not a measurement. It starts from φ and lays the result over faces. Whether real attractive faces fit it is a separate question, and researchers have since tested it.

Measured

What the studies found

Holland, 2008: the mask fits fashion models. Eric Holland tested Marquardt’s mask in Aesthetic Plastic Surgery: “Marquardt’s mask best describes the facial proportions of masculinized white women as seen in fashion models.” He added that it “does not appear to describe "ideal" face shape even for white women because its proportions are inconsistent with the optimal preferences of most people, especially with regard to femininity,” and that “The mask is ill-suited for non-European populations, especially sub-Saharan Africans and East Asians.”

Pallett, Link and Lee, 2010: the “new golden ratios”. Across four experiments in Vision Research they found that “individual attractiveness is optimized when the face’s vertical distance between the eyes and the mouth is approximately 36% of its length, and the horizontal distance between the eyes is approximately 46% of the face’s width. These "new" golden ratios match those of an average face.” Those are the two targets in the calculator above.

Zwahlen and colleagues, 2022: few “ideal” rules held up. They rated 30 3-D face photos with 101 laypeople and 60 patients in Hong Kong: “Despite several renowned 'ideal' parameters of attractive faces that have been recommended in the literature, only a few of them were found to be significantly correlated with attractive faces in Hong Kong Chinese.”

Londono and colleagues, 2022 review: no link. This systematic review in the Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry concluded: “No significant association was found between the golden ratio and facial evaluation scores among all ethnicities.” It also found that “the participant's facial height proportions did not follow the golden proportion.” One caution: a line in the same abstract’s results says the golden proportion “is found in natural facial esthetics”, which contradicts the conclusion, so the abstract is not consistent with itself. We quote the conclusion.

Why average wins

36% and 46% are not φ

Pallett’s “golden” ratios are golden only as a nickname. φ as a share is 61.8% (1 ÷ 1.618), and its square gives 38.2%. Neither 36% nor 46% is either one. What they are, in the study’s own words, is the proportions of “an average face.” The result points to averageness, not to a magic number.

Small differences, big claims. George Markowsky, in a 1992 paper on golden ratio myths, set a fair test for any claimed φ: it counts only if it is “within about 2% of Φ,” the range 1.58 to 1.66. The calculator shows whether your length ÷ width lands in that band. He applied the same test to buildings and paintings, which you can see in the golden ratio in art and architecture.

The navel claim. Another famous body claim is height ÷ navel height = φ. Markowsky measured his own family: “1.59, 1.63, 1.65 and 1.66”, and remarked that “the navel is a scar of no great importance in an adult human being.”