The Average Faces of Women Around the World

The Average Faces of Women Around the World

FaceResearch.org has published the results of a recent experiment where experimental psychologists at the University of Glasgow in Scotland have combined the faces of women around to world to approximate the "average face" of each country. Using a modern version of the technique that Sir Francis Galton pioneered in the 1800's, multiple images of faces are aligned and composited together to form the final result.

There is already controversy surrounding the results. Some people feel that the average is "too attractive." Part of this is explained by the process. Instead of having a lot of blurry images with undefined features, this method averages the shape of the features before blending the images together. Also when blending, remember that many singular issues are "averaged away." The study also does not reveal how the participants were selected or how large the sample size actually is.

No conclusive evidence, however, on Polish women's propensity for bangs.

average faces of women around the world

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Chris Knight's picture

Residing in New York City, Chris is an internationally published photographer whose work has appeared in Vogue, People, MSNBC, ABC, Ocean Drive, GQ and others. He is an instructor of Photography and Imaging at Pratt Institute and the New York Film Academy.

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Part of the reason these people are all so attractive is that mixing faces is like mixing genetics. Studies show that we human, like all other animals, for evolutionary purposes, find people who are genetically disimilar to us to be more attractive, we also find people with stronger genetics attractive. Mixed genes are generally stronger (part of the biological reason mixed race people tend to be considered more attractive). These faces are the mixture of hundreds of women each, that's hundreds of diverse and unique genetics averaged out. Hence these faces all feature extreme genetic diversity, and also average out any singular deformities or flaws in the process, we are thus highly attracted to them.

what about canada? only the best country in the world....

What about Canada?

Screw this wheres Canada/US? greatest countries in the world!

And whytf is it all women? this is sexist against men!

This makes Britney Spears Greek.

Well it is an excellent compilation of enormous data put in together. Cheers to the authors. It would be nice to have a similar data on male faces as well.

No Chile? I know we are far but not so much haha :(

So African cpuntries don't deserve specifics? "West Africa" like we all look alike...well done eh!

Aaaah, the ever-attractive powers of average :)

63 oercent of Americans are over weight.. so our average would probably be honey boos mom

nice post

I'd be pretty shocked if a team from Glasgow, Scotland, created the labels for these. "England"?!

How do you know that all of the subjects weren't located in London and the surrounding areas?

ok but none of them is average!

Several websites have been reporting that we made an image of the average woman from many different countries. However, we were not involved in making these images. They were created by Collin Spears using the face averager below.

Now put them ALL together.

I'd have loved to see the USA, not sure why it's the only country left off. I'd love to see the coloration of an 'average' american.

No Native Americans?

I'm a white South African o.0

... we truly are all cousins ...

I can recognize a brazilian girl face on that picture but not an "average face" of brazilian women.

Please note, THIS WAS NOT AN ACTUAL SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENT. THIS WAS AN ART PROJECT. The Daily Mail fucked up the description horribly. The pictures *were* made using the "face averager" application, but that's it. Details available at http://researchtheheadlines.org/2013/10/04/no-science-behind-the-story/

according to that computer generated pictures, Netherland women are the most beautiful compare to other white women. Korean women are the most beautiful compare to other Asian women and Ethiopian women are the most beautiful compare to other black women....Indian women are quite beautiful too.

The unnaturally high attractiveness of an "averaged" face has long been known.

Bah, I was hoping for a United States super-mutt. Leaving unsatisfied :(

Average england and mexico to get the american

"Averaging" in this sense means throwing out everything that's "off-key" so anything off putting like a hairlip or a mustache would be an outlier that wouldn't be reflected in the image

Aren't those the same thing?

Not really, because the "average" person is not flawless and all of these results are. No one is perfectly symmetrical and without any blemishes but all of these women are.

I meant hairlip and mustache being the same thing

And that ^, my friends. Is why I love women. Beautiful women all over the world, yes.

France, Italy and Spain: less hot than expected.

Let's consider that this is too average so multi-ethnic countries would be very influenced by the ethnicity on the result's face, so people will not agree with this, since there's no that face or skin tone around women in their cities.

And Europe still has the wrong idea about Brazil... =/

All of the white Europeans are beautiful, especially England, Italy, Greece and Germany the other white Europeans are very close, all the rest don't even come close.

I cannot agree with Italian, Hungarian and Romanian, Serbian at all that all look the same but are natural so different. Italian and Romanian should have longer faces and darker complexion. Most of Hungarian girls have brown eyes, they have almost black hair as well. German?..have long face, long and aquiline nose .
Polish- we have slimmer face and wavy hair with no fringe

This doesn't account for indigenous North Americans. In Canada alone we have Cree, Mi'kmaq, Mohawk, Ojibwa, etc. They all have different features. I think it would be a shame to not include them, as well as first nations from the US and Australia.