[amber heard]Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP Who's the fairest of them all? Julian De Silva, a London-based cosmetic surgeon, thinks he may have the answer. He used a mathematical ratio sometimes referred to as the "Golden Ratio" and told The Daily Mail that actress Amber Heard is the person with "the most beautiful face in the world, according to science." Here's a taste of the story: Amber Heard's face was found to be 91.85 per cent accurate to the Greek Golden Ratio of Beauty Phi — which for thousands of years was thought to hold the secret formula of perfection ... From pictures, her eyes, eyebrows, nose, lips, chin, jaw, and facial shape were measured and 12 key marker points were analyzed and found to be 91.85 per cent of the Greek ratio of Phi which is 1.618. Kim Kardashian's face came second with 91.39 per cent, Kate Moss was third with 91.06 per cent, Blurred Lines model Emily Ratajkowski was fourth with 90.8 per cent, and Kendall Jenner was fifth with 90.18 per cent accuracy of her features to the beauty ratio Phi. De Silva's website describes him as a "facial cosmetic surgeon who specializes in the eyes, nose, face and neck areas only." He offers women his formula for calculating their own beauty, based on the "golden" ratio of 1.62. But is his golden ratio method scientifically sound? And can it dictate who we find attractive or unattractive? John Allen Paulos, a Temple University research mathematician and author of books like "Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences," doesn't think so. "There's no evidence for most of these claims," he said in a call with Tech Insider. "And when there is, it's merely descriptive. Yes, okay, that ratio is approximately 1.62, but so what? There's lots of other rectangles with ratios like 1.8 and 1.5." "It's not such an unusual ratio," he added. "It's a common rectangle." A 5x3 index card, for example, meets the Golden Ratio standard. "There's no scientific discovery that's ever followed from any kind of scientific application of the 'Golden Ratio,'" he said. "It doesn't predict anything. It isn't at the base of any sort of argument that has some kind of scientific content." The Golden Ratio describes two measures of any kind. Let's use line segments, as in the example below. For the measures to exist in "golden" ratio to one another, the ratio between the smaller measure and the larger one must equal the ratio between the larger measure and the sum of the two measures added together. When that's the case, the ratio is an irrational number close to 1.62, often denoted by the Greek letter Phi.[Golden Ratio Diagram]Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP That's all there is to it really. A mathematical quirk, with no relationship to any objective beauty standard — unless you happen to find it visually pleasing. One way you can use the Golden Ratio is to draw a spiral shape within a rectangle. That shape is sometimes superimposed on images along with the claim that they are somehow "aesthetically perfect." People often say they've found the ratio in places it does not exist, as Nautilus reported in 2013: The spiral of the nautilus’ shell is often said to fit precisely within a golden rectangle regardless of its size. But that is untrue. Each nautilus shell does maintain the same proportions throughout the animal’s life (that is, it’s a logarithmic spiral), but that proportion is generally not the golden ratio. Many have also claimed that the golden ratio is found in the proportions of various parts of the human body, the shape of the Gutenberg Bible, the Mona Lisa, and the Parthenon. None of these assertions have stood up to skeptical scrutiny, yet these myths stick with us. The mathematician Keith Devlin once gave a talk about the golden ratio, discussing numerous misunderstandings and debunking them, but when a radio station re-broadcast a portion of his lecture, it crucially omitted the fact that the examples were all false. People are really good at spotting patterns, and if you've trained yourself to believe a certain common pattern has a beautiful virtue, you're likely to spot it everywhere. The parody Twitter account "Fibonacci Perfection" superimposes the golden rectangle on absurd situations, revealing how aesthetically imperfect supposed "golden" images often are: Tweet Embed: https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/749223659152273408 Ignatius Farray (@IgnatiusFarray1) pic.twitter.com/CNLkz3MBze Tweet Embed: https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/749947856384061440 Leslie Knope's fall (Parks and Recreation) pic.twitter.com/NlubnanBYQ Tweet Embed: https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/748654082336952320 George Bush shoe attack pic.twitter.com/MWCeVDTxFs Tweet Embed: https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/748299663766347776 Latvia pic.twitter.com/RfbY4rKsyY Mathematics serves to answer formal, abstract questions about patterns and the universe. The standards of human beauty emerge, in large part, from messy cultural norms and the sexual and aesthetic preferences of individual people. Individual people vary _wildly_ in terms of beauty standards — so much so that unless you cherry-pick studies it's hard to make much sense at all of the available science on what makes people more or less attractive. There is certainly no evidence that a particular mathematically-derived lip shape or eyebrow-archness is somehow a key toward unlocking a universal human beauty response. If your face doesn’t meet the standards of an entirely arbitrary ratio, don’t worry. It’s meaningless. De Silva did not return a request for comment. NOW WATCH: This woman uses makeup to transform herself into hugely famous celebrities
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