The origin and meaning of facial beauty represent a longstanding puzzle.
Despite the profuse literature devoted to facial attractiveness, its very
nature, its determinants and the nature of inter-person differences remain
controversial issues. Here we tackle such questions proposing a novel
experimental approach in which human subjects, instead of rating natural faces,
are allowed to efficiently explore the face-space and 'sculpt' their favorite
variation of a reference facial image. The results reveal that different
subjects prefer distinguishable regions of the face-space, highlighting the
essential subjectivity of the phenomenon.The different sculpted facial vectors
exhibit strong correlations among pairs of facial distances, characterising the
underlying universality and complexity of the cognitive processes, and the
relative relevance and robustness of the different facial distances.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures. Supplementary information: 26 pages, 13 figure