Wednesday, April 15, 2009

My facial resemblance to various ethnic groups according to online calculators, how my face compares with neo-classical ideals

I stumbled across an interesting website, after doing a Google search for Israel + "CS Coon (I was trying to find the statement by Coon, that the ancient Israelites looked just like modern Europeans).

The website I came across contains an "anthropometric calculator" (http://dienekes.awardspace.com/calc/anthro/ ), and a "racial analysis calculator" (http://dienekes.awardspace.com/calc/rac/ ).

You use the "anthropometric calculator" by plugging in 13 measurements of your face in millimeters and one measuring the angle of your nose (the angle where the nose meets the eyebrow).

According to the calculator, I most resemble, facially speaking, the Greeks, although I am 1.63 standard deviations away from the average Greek.

The extent to which I resemble various groups facially speaking (the higher the number represents how close the group is supposed to be to me facially, the higher the number the closer):

Greek 25, Japanese 24, Hungarian 20, Slovakian 20, Slovenian 20, African-American 19, Zulu 18 Russian 15, Iranian 15, Italian 14, Thailand 12, Crete 12, Poland 11, Azores 10, Germany 10, Singapore 9, Egypt 7, Netherlands Antilles 7, Turkey 5, Virgin Islands 4, Czech 4, Portuguese 2, White American 2, India Indian 1, Tongan 0.

Strange thing here, is that according to the calculator, I am completely different from the ancestry groups of my parents (except for the fact my mom was named Helen), while I most closely resemble groups that as far as I know are not part of my ancestry. Nobody ever says or thins that I look African-American, Zulu, or Japanese. People tend to think I look Spanish, or Latin American (I have some Spanish ancestry but it is less than 7 percent of my overall ancestry); some people think I simply look like a white American.

However I have heard that I have American Indian, 'First Peoples" ancestry (according to the census there are 7 million Americans of this type); and I've heard the American Indians came from the Japan area via the Bering Straight (http://www.ambassadors4peace.org/Newsletters/Stories/Oct05/beringStrait.jpg).

Looking Greek appeals to my vanity, insofar as after studying the matter hard on the internet, I concluded that the "chosen people" of Christ, the ancient Israelites, were descended from the Luwians; apparently the Trojans of Troy were Luwian.

According to Dienekes, whose website contains the amazing calculators, the ancient Greeks looked just like the modern Greeks (http://dienekes.awardspace.com/pictures/composites/ ).

The racial calculator works like the anthropometric calculator; you plug in some measurements of your face and head and click the button.

According to the racial calculator, I am somewhere between a proto-europoid and an Alpine, closer to Proto-europoid than Alpine. The results spewed out by the "Racial analysis calculator":

Your cephalic index is: 81.5 (brachycephalic) (meaning-- A brachycephalic skull is relatively broad and short typically with the breadth at least 80% of the length).

Your height/length index is: 66.3 (hypsicephalic) (meaning-- having a high forehead)

Your height/breadth index is: 81.4 (metriocephalic) (meaning having a head well proportioned to height)

Your facial index is: 79.9 (euryprosopic) (meaning-- Having a short or broad face)

Your upper facial index is: 48.7 (euryene) (meaning--Having a short or broad forehead )

Your nasal index is: 84.3 (mesorrhine) (meaning--Having a nose of moderate size)

Your estimated endocranial volume is: 1213 cc (oligocephalic) (meaning--three basic shapes that human heads come in, Oligocephalic (roundish), Mesocephalic (squarish) & Dolocephalic (Ovalish)).

Your estimated brain weight is: 1097 gr (meaning--"It is of significance that an oligocephalic (1000 ml) brain of Anatole France exercised Voltairean genius").

While experimenting with the calculator, I came across some web pages (http://archfaci.ama-assn.org/cgi/reprint/6/2/78.pdf ) that discussed "neo-classical" ideals with regards to facial proportion, that some "neo-classical" theorists reduced to proportional formulas. I even came across a clever pedantic woman who I thought was insane, because she feels there is a pressing need for measuring facial beauty using formulas based on measurements of the face, and so therefore went on to put tons of work into some book devoted to producing mathematial formulas that would supposedly allow us to quantify and rate facial attractiveness.

In some ways my face falls short of the "neo-classical" ideals; in other ways my face satisfies the neoclassical ideals (a very small percentage of faces satisfy any given neoclassical ideal).

My face falls short of the neoclassical canons of ideal facial proportion in the following ways:

My forehead is supposedly not high enough, compared to eye to chin distance (canon I); my nose is not long enough where it intersects with the face, compared to my forehead and my nose to chin distance (canon II); my forehead and also my upper head (top of forehead to top of head) are not vertically long enough compared to bottom of nose to chin distance (canon III); my ear is too big compared to the height of my nose where it intersects with my face (canon IV); my nose is too wide compared to the width of mouth (canon VII); my mouth is too wide compared to the width of my face (canon VIII);

Regarding these measurements by which I fail to satisfy the neo-classical ideals, with African-American men: 3% satisfy canon I; 0% satisfy canon II; 0% satisfy canon III; 1% satisfy canon IV; 1% satisfy canon VII; and, 0% satisfy canon VIII. I could not find the data re what percentage of whites satisfy the neoclassical ideals.

I manage to succeed where about 99% fail, by fulfilling the ideals of the neoclassical canons regarding facial proportion in the following ways: my forehead height is equal to the distance from my chin to the bottom of my nose (satisfies 2/3 of canon II); my forehead equals the distance from the top of my head to my hairline at the top of my forehead (satisfies 2/3 of canon III); the distance between my eyes equals the width of my nose (canon V); the distance between my eyes equals the width of each eye (canon VI).

Re these canons that I succeed in according with--for African-American men: 0% satisfy canon II completely; 4% satisfy Canon II in the same partial way that I do; 0% satisfy canon III completely; 0% satisfy canon V; and 12% satisfy canon VI.

I have a wide face, my mouth is not wide, yet my mouth is too wide compared to the width of my face, according to the neoclassical facial proportions idealists. This indicates to me, that the neo-classical facial proportion idealists were looking for mouths that are very narrow compared to the width of the face, like some sort of painting of a feminine cherubic angel.

The neoclassical theorists seem to idealize rather high foreheads and noses at the line where the nose intersects with the face. They seem to be into feminine looking unrealistically narrow noses.

The idea of symmetry as beauty is neo-classical. I am symmetric in a way that the neoclassical theorists I guess did not have the time to get around to canonizing: my mouth is as wide as my nose is long at the line where my nose intersects with my face.

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