You: Being Beautiful: The Owner’s Manual to Inner and Outer Beauty. Michael Roizen F.

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      Quick, think of a place that doesn’t have a mirror. Pretty hard, right? Bathrooms, of course, have them. So do cars, department stores, gyms, supermarkets, hotel lobbies, bars, subway cars, purses, bedroom walls, and bedroom ceilings. In fact, you’d almost have to be living in solitary confinement or a single-seat submarine not to have the opportunity to judge your own appearance through your reflection.^*

      Besides constantly being judged by your own gaze, your face and body often serve as the target for other people’s eyes (and perhaps whistles). While it may seem unfair to be under such constant visual scrutiny, the fact remains that beautiful people have more advantages than unattractive folks. Sounds harsh, we know, but just consider the evidence:

      In this part of the book we’ll be examining the elements that primarily determine whether or not you’re perceived as beautiful or not—things like skin, hair, and body shape. But before we start any specific discussion of various wrinkles and jiggles, we’d like you to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

      Though we’ll have plenty to say about the body’s anatomical wonders, the most important body part of all when it comes to beauty isn’t a luscious lip or hardened glute. It’s your brain.

      Now, we’re not suggesting that the pituitary gland and hypothalamus are party-stopping body parts the way a silky mane or a plywood-flat waist may be.^* What we are suggesting is that beauty is always on your mind. In fact, your brain needs beauty.

      Your brain—under intense demand to process an infinite amount of information at any given moment—must make choices about whom to trust, whom to mate with, and whom to run from. It does this by dispensing with unnecessary stimuli—and drawing conclusions from a select few pieces of info. So we’re not programmed to not worry about whether a strand of hair is out of place but are programmed to note the subtleties of facial expressions, whether the slight curve in a lip is conveying anger, sadness, or fear. That process, really, is the foundation of perception—how you perceive and contextualize the facts and faces all around you.^† Beauty is not as much a physical property of the person, as the end product of a complex mental process that translates millions of meaningless dots of light on the back of our retinas into 3-D shapes, objects, and faces. Embedded in the software of the mind is a set of rules that are used to decode these raw “bytes” of visual information. Think of these “bytes” as the letters in the alphabet. The perceptual rules are like grammar; they determine how the parts are combined to create a whole.

      What’s most interesting is that these observations are automatic—a beauty reflex, if you will. Most of us, especially when we’re young, have a strong sex drive—a drive so strong, in fact, that it often overshadows all of our other natural drives. But nobody instructed us to be sexually attracted to others. We didn’t have to learn about hourglass figures or chiseled jaws. It was instinctive—a genetically programmed behavior.

      These instinctive behaviors aren’t conscious acts. They’re spontaneous, irrepressible, and predictable. They’re performed without evident reason, but rather with stimulation. Your beauty detectors, like Doppler radar, are able to scan the environment in real time for signs of an attractive mate and forecast a conclusion about that environment. Your assessments are fast and accurate. For example, you can observe a human face for a fraction of a second and accurately rate its beauty—and what it’s trying to communicate to you, through expressions, nuances, and all kinds of nonverbal signals. Similarly, your appearance affects the first impressions that others have of you. And that first one can be a lasting one.

      So how do we make those snap judgments? It all starts with a group of numbers called the Fibonacci sequence. That sequence is 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on. Each new number is the sum of the two before it, and the ratio of each number to the one before it approximates the value of phi, or 1.618.^* OK, so you may be asking what in the world a group of numbers has to do with the fact that you prefer just a little bit of nicely groomed chest hair. Well, phi is the basis for what’s called the divine proportion or the golden ratio: the ratio of lengths from one element to another is 1.618 to 1 (see Figure A.1). This golden ratio is found throughout nature, from leaves to seed arrangements to conch shells, and it also figures prominently in a list of man’s greatest accomplishments, like the Great Pyramids, the Parthenon, Michelangelo’s David, and Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. The omnipresence of phi throughout our world creates a sense of balance, harmony, and beauty in the designs we see naturally and artificially.

      Phi is also a driving force in human attraction—men and women around the globe prefer a mate whose face is symmetrical and follows this ratio. (More than 2,000 years ago, Pythagoras developed a formula for the perfect female face, which included such stats as this one: The ratio of the width of the mouth to the width of the nose should be—tada!—1.618 to 1.) In this part, you’ll see more examples of this on the human body. Now, we’re not suggesting that you move your eyeballs closer together or farther apart if they don’t meet these statistical standards, but we are suggesting that there are many easier options that can make the ratio closer.