Virtual Beauty

There's an interesting post at Statistical Modeling... on research into the classification and synthesis of facial beauty. The first part mentions work by Australian researchers who created classification software devoted to answering the question "fairest of them all?" The second part points to an older German study that concluded that the most beautiful faces don't and can't exist:

"Having these results in mind it is also not surprising that a model agency from Munich chose 88% artificial faces (14 out of 16 selected faces) for potentially being interesting as a model for the category “beauty”. Only two natural male faces could keep up with the computer generated ones, within the group of female faces no natural faces have been selected! We also asked test subjects to indicate the most attractive faces found the same pattern: 81% (13 out of 16) of the selected faces had been generated by the computer.