Original subtitles

Good evening, tonight's programme is on the human face and so am I

because this is a human face that I'm standing on

The BBC has miniaturised me at enormous expense, by BBC standards of course,

so that we can take an even closer look than usual at the subject of beauty

Hello!

And the question that we're hoping to answer tonight is what is beauty

and is it in the eye of the beholder?

So, let's start by asking some babies

From our earliest days we appreciate beauty

Research has shown babies spend longer looking at adults with smooth skin,

big eyes and full lips

And they don't like uglies

The fact that the tiniest babies are drawn to beautiful faces

shows how much beauty matters to us human beings

For instance, the face I'm standing on this evening

belongs to Elizabeth Hurley

Good evening!

Good evening

And obviously we wouldn't have asked Elizabeth to do the show

if she looked like this

Beauty does matter but the odd thing is it matters

even more than we consciously realise

You know, professionally and personally it gets you in almost every door

If they think you're the most stylish man or the most handsome man,

then related to work, then wonderful

It is a true fact of our society that looks are important

Anyone that doesn't believe it, no, women that say,

"I keep a clean house, he loves me",

no woman's husband ever came home and said,

"the floor's immaculate, lie down you hot slut", never happens

All the studies show that beautiful people get better jobs and earn more money

Appearances even matter when it comes to getting the top job,

for example, which of these two men would you vote for

In September 1960 John Kennedy and Richard Nixon appeared on radio

and television battling for the presidency

I believe the programmes that Senator Kennedy

advocates will have a tendency to stifle those creative entities

I really don't need Mr Nixon to tell me

what my responsibilities are as a citizen...

People who listened to the debate on the radio thought that Nixon had won,

but people who watched it n television disagreed

Nixon's sweats and his five o'clock shadow put them off

and they pronounced Kennedy the winner

Nixon had refused makeup saying it was for gays

If you have beauty it brings many hidden advantages

but what gives it this extraordinary power?

After all, Helen of Troy didn't just win the Miss Pelopponese title,

she started a nine-year war

Let's start by seeing what most people think

Well, I think beauty is in the eye of the beholder,

I mean, I can think of some very beautiful actresses

and models who I think are fabulous and I can say to a boy,

my gosh, she's gorgeous - I can't stand her, I hate those big lips

and she's way too thin - but I genuinely think she's gorgeous

How do supermodels like Kate Moss affect you?

Because the fashion industry is unanimous

Something like Kate's face is incredible

because her bone structure just sort of, you know, bowls you over,

she has got such fabulous bone structure

so as far as a canvas for a makeup artist to make her up and,

you know, she's just so desperately photogenic as well

Sarah Doukas is head of the Storm Model Agency

She discovered Kate Moss and she's acknowledged

as an expert at spotting the next fashionable face

She believes that ideas of beauty change all the time

It's very fast-flowing, I mean, we find a lot of faces

and they are fashionable for a moment

We're constantly looking for new faces but it's become voracious

It doesn't get more voracious than this,

seven hundred entries in a competition to find a new face for the Agency

When it all started ten, fifteen years ago,

the faces started to look very unconventional, you know,

you used to hear people say, she's hideous or, you know,

I mean, I think that girl is really quite ugly, I mean,

I think the general public are probably quite aghast

at some of the strange faces in magazines like The Face for example,

but I think gradually obviously it gets inside one

and it's what we consider is beautiful

Today Sarah is face to face with the ten finalists she's selected

She's looking for the next beautiful face

that will work for the fashion industry

This is Zara, aged seventeen

This is Samantha aged sixteen, Laura aged eighteen, Rachel aged eighteen

So who will they go for and why?

Eyes should be wide spaced; you can't have a weak jaw;

you can't have a sort of flat nose because the light hits it

and you end up sort of with a, you know, a banana

I love the nose and the mouth, it's slightly imbalanced,

it's, do you know what I mean?

The eyes are slightly smaller than, she's just got such an interesting...

do you think she's a possible... I'm still thinking back to Rachel...

I don't know, there's just something about her...

I know, she's serene and beautiful...

although she's terribly pretty and she's beautiful,

she's got a very sort of...

There's some disagreement about who is more beautiful, Rachel or Zara

Yeah, its' not as interesting I would say...

Yes, it hasn't got as much sort of depth,

whereas somebody like Zara has got such a good structure in place,

the camera just loves her face...

They've chosen Zara Would you have?

Apart from a big hooter, cross eyes or missing teeth,

the widely held view in the fashion industry seems to be

that beauty is what the fashion industry says it is,

but I suspect there's more to beauty than that

So, what can we say about his potent force in our lives?

Well, here's a starting point

Look at the face I'm standing on

Now, whether you think Elizabeth Hurley is extraordinarily pretty

or stunningly beautiful isn't worth arguing about

because very few people are going to maintain that she's a total dog...

Thanks John

Not at all Elizabeth and welcome to the show

Now, this gives us a clue to what scientists have been discovering

Many scientists think that far from being a matter of personal taste,

there are universal rules for beauty,

patterns that beautiful people have in common,

something that can even be measured

Well, these five look very different to me so, the grid...

Facial surgeon Dr Stephen Marquardt has spent over twenty-five years

almost obsessively searching for the rules that govern beauty

My job was to make faces more attractive that were

deformed from birth or in car accidents, those kinds of things

I noticed most of the patients did look more attractive when I was done,

a few looked about the same and occasionally they wouldn't look as good,

and that was, that was very distressing, as you can imagine,

particularly if some of the operations were nine hours in length

and to operate that long and have, we always would fix the functional problem

but to have them not look as good was extremely disappointing

So what did that make you feel?

It made me wonder what attractiveness was,

I was doing the same thing for everyone

Hoping to find some clues to the rules which govern beauty,

Stephen Marquardt went out and asked people who worked in the beauty industry

So I just started canvassing different people that I knew in those industries

and it was pathetic, I couldn't believe it,

nobody knew what beauty was...

nobody could understand it, people, everybody had a different idea

Everybody had an opinion about what beauty was

and a lot of people's opinion was it's kind of a,

ethereal oneness with the universe, if you will,

and when they told me "ethereal oneness with the universe" it's like,

hey wow, wait a minute, I'm a surgeon, you know, that isn't,

that's not gonna help me out, so I kept looking

Stephen wanted to see if people could agree on anything about beauty,

so he did his own study

He got photographs of eighteen very different women

and then asked people from all over the world to say

which they found more and less attractive

We had people rank these eighteen faces according to

what they thought was more attractive to least attractive

They found the faces up here most attractive,

then as you came down here they found them less and less attractive

until we get down to this area when they found them barely human looking

Some of these patients were taken out of medical textbooks,

they were published years and years ago and today

no one would ever get this bad before they were treated

These are all real people, they're all women between the ages

of about fourteen and twenty-four to thirty

This is the entire range of human visual appearance of the faces

and we try to include everything in our study and, astoundingly,

everybody in the world within about ninety-seven percent

ranked these eighteen photographs exactly the same

We thought people from Asia would have a different concept,

but it was very consistent all through the world,

didn't make any difference whether somebody was four years old

or eighty years old, they ranked them the same, it was just astounding

What this study suggests is that there are some things we can all agree on,

some universal rules of beauty

So what are some of these universal factors that hold true for all beauty?

Let's start by looking at babies Ahh...

Babies seem to generally be considered very attractive,

so I started studying baby's faces

and I wondered if there was an ideal face for baby and it turns out there is,

there is an archetypal face, not only for the adult

but there is one for the infant too

But baby's beauty is quite different from adult beauty

This baby looks wrong, doesn't he?

It's because he's got an adult face on a baby's body

For some reason the medieval artist Giotto

didn't give this face a baby's proportions

Babies judged attractive tend to have plump cheeks, rosebud lips

and enormous eyes all scrunched up together in the centre of the face

It's these proportions that release our protective instincts. Ahh...

Yes, he's not quite what I'm looking for

Well what about this one?

No, no, I don't think so

How about this?

Sorry to be difficult but it's not right

Well, I don't think I have anything else, unless this appeals to you at all?

Now that is beautiful, oh, I love the way he dribbles, does he hunt?

No

Good, cos I can't wait to protect him

Ahh. It's that helpless, nurture-me look that men eventually learn

is what makes babies attractive

What's certainly true is that good-looking babies often stay good-looking

Out of earshot I could hear people, the grown ups, saying oh,

he's very good looking, he's just like his father,

he's just like his father...

When was that, when do you remember that?

I think I was probably four, five, he didn't understand it

but there was something about your look, something that was right about you

Look at these teenagers

The baby face features, large eyes, rounded cheeks and full lips

are still judged attractive - but a lot's changed

They become attractive in a different way,

not in a parental nurturing way but in a sexually attractive way for a mate

When did you realise that you were beautiful?

I realised that other people thought I was beautiful around thirteen or fourteen,

I, I started noticing that the behaviour of others around me changed

If we're talking about female beauty and standards of female attractiveness,

the two largest predictors are youth and health

Dr David Buss studies human mating behaviour

Things like clear skin, smooth skin, full lips because lips,

most people don't know this, lips get thinner as you age

and so full lips is a sign of youth, also a sign of health

Stephen Marquardt suggests there may be an age range of maximum beauty

There's a certain window during our life

when we're most attractive particularly women,

and that's about, between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four,

that's, they start menstruating at fourteen,

they're ready to reproduce and that correlates

and coincides with their highest window of attractiveness physically,

and particularly facially

I don't think that's true at all in girls or boys as it happens cos I,

it's a different sort of sweet puppyish sort of prettiness when your very young,

but you know, it doesn't really move you, I don't think, it's sweet

I think I got prettier in my late twenties certainly than in my early twenties,

whereas you know convention would have it you look at your best

when you're seventeen then go off the boil from then on

Scientists however suggest that although there may be individual differences,

basically youthful features advertise sex

Sex, of course, advertises products

This is Zara who you'll remember was plucked out of obscurity

to be a new fashion model

I got a letter through the post, which was harsh

cos I didn't know whether to open it or not

The first letters I saw were "I hope you are alright, so I was like,

oh, what's this gonna be, you know, and it was just,

congratulations in big black capital letters

Zara's now much in demand but why?

What is it about her face that people find so compelling?

Scientist Dr Stephen Marquardt thinks he knows

The question's gonna come up for you with people,

what is attractive about you?

You are attractive and people will tell you you're attractive

and the reason you're attractive is you have the components of

both the adult beautiful face and the baby's beautiful face,

which is really interesting, it's very unusual

What it does is it incorporates not only the adult beauty of the high cheekbones

and the pretty nose, nice shape, and the nice forehead, nice jaw line,

but also the slightly retreated chin and the cupid's bow upper lip

She has a very short upper lip like a baby and a cupid's bow upper lip

like a baby and the retreated chin of a baby

and the larger features of an infant, which is very attractive,

combined with the adult features of the high cheekbones,

pretty nose, beautiful skin and big eyes

I've always thought I've got really peaky eyes, little eyes,

I don't know and big lips, I used to hate my lips when I was younger

and everyone used to call me Joker at school cos that smile,

can you see that, I used to get picked on

So how beautiful do you consider Zara?

Well, before you decide let's hear some other theories about beauty

Almost all scientific theories about beauty are based on

so-called evolutionary psychology

The idea is that much human behaviour is subconsciously driven by our animal past

For all our apparent sophistication, we are, deep down,

creatures driven by a fairly basic biological urge- to mate

And to have offspring

But how well does this theory explain human behaviour connected with beauty?

Well, looking down at Elizabeth's face makes me think of makeup...

Estee Lauder

That's enough of that!

Human beings have been using makeup for over four thousand years,

so they must have developed some inkling of what

they're trying to achieve with it, what buttons they're trying to press

Even in ancient Egypt women were already using the same techniques they do today

They enhanced their eyes with coal and used iron

and copper ores to decorate their face

Dermatologist Dr Vail Reese thinks makeup has one main purpose

Well, makeup really tries to minimise any discolouration of the skin,

any irregular contour and then better allow attention to be drawn

to certain features such as the eyes or the lips,

which we as humans want to accentuate, at least in women at least

You put on a base to sort of even everything out

and it's like making a flat clean canvas and then you start painting

So, how do we paint features and why?

Well, eye makeup; can make the eyes look bigger, therefore younger and sexier

Also darkening the upper lids can produce so-called bedroom eyes

Why do bedroom eyes exist? Why do we associate that with sexiness?

It's because in the last stage of sexual encounters,

a moment or two before our orgasm, one of the muscles that

keeps the upper eyelid up relaxes and the eyes begin to droop,

so someone who has bedroom eyes in a sense looks like

they're always on the verge of orgasm, that is where extended...

A permanent characteristic that reminds us of the way

we look at that particular moment, just before...

...without even thinking about it

Next, lipstick

Psychologists argue that when you get aroused your lips get fuller

and redder and that's what red lipstick is trying to mimic

When people are sexually aroused, the psychologists tell me,

the lips, for example, will not only get larger, they become engorged,

there's more blood in the lips so they actually get a darker colour

You read Desmond Morris on that, didn't you?

Yes, some of it, but I didn't know whether all of that was right,

but what I was talking about is just the fact that...

I think it's rubbish

You think it's rubbish?

Utter rubbish He said that women do red lips,

mirroring the red vulvas of chimpanzees when they're in heat

Well, it's obvious, isn't it? Bollocks

Some evolutionary biology may be bollocks but I do believe that

makeup helps advertise fertility by emphasising youth and health

and the link between beauty and health turns out

to be much closer than I ever imagined

Just look at those hurdlers

Ever wondered why top athletes tend to be good looking?

Professor John Manning is doing research which links looks with running ability

He's doing it here by measuring ears

Our research has concentrated on athletic ability

and what the face tells us about that

The link which ties athletic ability to beauty

in Professor Manning's research is symmetry

Whether the two sides of your face are the same

or very different seems to affect your running ability

Runners with asymmetric ears run more slowly than runners with symmetric ears,

and this is not a question of wind speed and aerodynamic aspects of the face

So what's going on here? Well, people with symmetrical bodies

find it easier to run faster, and having more symmetrical ears

is a sign you've got a more symmetrical body

This is amazing when you think about it, because these are,

asymmetries are very, very small, they're of the order of a millimetre or so,

but we seem to be able to perceive them and people rate symmetric faces

as being more attractive than asymmetric faces

Do you agree? How do you prefer me?

Normal like this? Or symmetrical like this?

And what's the big thing about symmetry?

Well, it all begins in the womb

We all start off looking like aliens

but we're programmed to grow symmetrically so,

if all goes well we turn into pretty symmetrical adults

But things can go wrong

Now, obviously a symmetrical face is typically a healthy face,

but you have a parasitic infection or if you have congenital malformation

of some kind that's distorted your face, it's going to produce an asymmetry

and when you detect something asymmetrical it's no longer attractive

and you don't want to mate with it

What neurologist Dr Ramachandran is saying is that

if you're unfortunate enough to have been infested

with a parasite such as a tapeworm

and it's residing inside you when you're growing up,

then this will affect not only your bodily health but also your face

If you have a parasitic infection you may not be able,

you may not be very fertile, for all these reasons

it's best to avoid an asymmetrical face and this may be one reason why you're,

there's a repulsion, so you recoil from anything that's deformed,

asymmetrical, distorted...

Because it could be dangerous

Because it could be dangerous

In a more primitive sense, the face advertises health, okay?

Any doctor will tell you one of the first things they teach you

in medical school is to look at the face

In Stephen Marquardt's study, the faces ranked good looking were more symmetrical,

the less attractive faces were less symmetrical

and the grossly asymmetric induced a feeling almost of repulsion

It's this innate reaction to faces that Hollywood has exploited

You'll have the clear-complected individual as the hero

and then any skin defect can be used by film-makers to identify to audiences,

"watch out for this one", so that skin really becomes a reflection

not just of health but of moral content

I'm so unhappy, my stepmother and sisters are going to the ball without me,

I do wish I could go to

And so you shall

Who are you?

I'm your fairy godmother dear, I've got a heart of gold

I don't trust you, you're hideous

This is facial fascism

Poor woman.

It's true that people with bad skin are not evil, I mean,

both you and I know that rationally

but they have done studies to show that if you,

they will take subjects and have them interact with someone

who is clear complected or interact with someone

say with acne scars or a large scar,

that there was more hesitation, there was more concern,

more fear associated with the people that

did not have normal skin or good skin

Henry de Lotbiniere has facial cancer,

he knows what it's like to be stared at and judged by others

But he's very philosophical about the way he looks

and he's not upset by the honest reaction of children

I find it extremely entertaining talking to a five-year-old

about why I've only got one eye or look slightly odd,

and I've always been impressed by the simple way that the five-year-old

is just interested and enjoys the conversation on the bus

with a complete stranger about what it's like to only have one eye

This is Henry at twenty-one when he was studying to become a barrister

and he's still working

If I went into some absolutely extreme state then it might be different,

but certainly having an eye removed, having the shape looking a bit odd,

losing all the nerves and muscles in the left hand side of my face,

so that when I smile in a happy way as I understand it the right hand side

of my face moves but the left hand doesn't move a bit,

it simply for some reason doesn't worry me

Henry was forty-two when he first discovered that

he had a rare facial cancer

It started under his left eye and gradually progressed

Henry's proud to have a family who've supported him through all his surgery

I mean, my wife and children don't appear

to pay any attention to what I look like,

they don't get worried, they don't express relief that

I'm not too bad and I think that helps me as the patient enormously

because I'm not being reminded of it, I don't have people sympathising,

I don't have people saying, "I wish they'd done a better job",

and that leaves me just being me

Possibly, the gradual change in his appearance made it slightly easier

for Henry and his family to deal with

A sudden change can be traumatic in a different way

Dr Stephen Marquardt was only four years old when his mother's face

was badly damaged in a car accident

My grandmother and aunt just took me in and actually, you know,

I was walking ahead of them down the hallway of my grandmother's house,

my mother walked out of the bedroom she was staying in at the time

and her eyes were all bloodshot, her nose was squashed on her face,

she had no upper teeth, her two jaws were wired together,

her face was all cut and sutured, I mean, she looked like a monster

and I just about had a heart attack

I turned around and she mumbled, "Stevie", you know, "hi",

through her wired jaws and I turned around and ran out the room screaming

and I didn't trust my grandmother, my aunt or my uncles or anybody

for several weeks after that, I wouldn't have anything to do with them

She wasn't my mother any more, she didn't act the same,

she didn't look the same, she didn't talk the same,

there was just, and then everybody said, "this is your mother",

it was very difficult at four and a half at that point or five years old,

it was like, "here's your mother back, have a nice day"

Interestingly, the surgeon who did take care of her at the time

of her accident was a maxillofacial surgeon like I was,

and I think that probably at some point, level,

maybe that's why I got into it

Life is a crazy thing, crazy things happen and sometimes you don't realise

where you've been until you look in your rear view mirror, you know

Stephen's childhood experience not only led him into a career as a surgeon,

it also motivated his search for the rules of beauty

He found his first clues in the writings of a Greek philosopher

Remember Pythagoras?

The square of the hypotenuse of a right angle triangle is equal

to the sum of the squares of the other two sides

Thank you Elizabeth Yes, him

He claimed not only to quantify,

to understand the secret of the code of beauty,

he claimed to see beauty in the universe, that's a pretty big statement

I'm looking for beauty in the face,

he says he found it for the universe, that's pretty amazing

What Pythagoras realised is that plants and animals

grow according to fairly precise mathematical laws

It's not just chance that flowers unfold in beautiful patterns,

and the Greeks found the patterns were based on a particular geometrical ratio,

but it wasn't until the Renaissance that an Italian did the maths

He figured out that the key to beauty was the ratio of 1 to 1.618

Grazie. Oh, Miss Linguini, wait, take your glasses off,

now let your hair come a-tumbling down

Miss Linguini, you're beautiful

And yet, and you're not going to believe this, 1.618 actually works

Do something like measure the distance from the floor to your navel

and then from your navel to your head

If you're well proportioned the ratio should be 1 to 1.618,

and that ratio is seen all over the beautiful body

People started noticing it, artists noticed it, the width of the,

in a beautiful face for example, not in any face but it had to be beautiful,

if a face was beautiful the

width of the mouth was exactly 1.618 times the width of the nose,

if the face wasn't beautiful that wasn't the case

Dentists, in their dental work, noticed that the upper front tooth

was 1.618 times as wide as the next tooth over,

the lateral incisor, so the central incisor was 1.618 times

the width of the lateral incisor, the next tooth over

Wonderful, give me some more examples

Your fingers, the, your fingers are each called phalanges,

and each bone in the finger is called a phalanx,

and the phalanx that's the most,

the closest to your knuckle here is 1.618 times

the phalanx that's in the middle and that's 1.618 times

the length of the phalanx at the end which is finger nail

So that was kind of amazing, this number would come up over and over again

Now remember Zara? Would all this theory work on a real person like her?

This is what's called a golden divider,

it divides different line areas or distances from,

into 1 and 1.618, which is the golden ratio and in a beautiful face

we'll see that ordinarily the width of the mouth is 1.618 times

the width of the nose, and it does in Zara, exactly

If we look at the teeth we can see that ordinarily, show me your teeth,

smile a little bit, the width of the upper front tooth is 1.618 times

the width of the tooth right next to it and the same on the other side,

the width of the upper front tooth is 1.618 times

the width of the tooth next to it,

so it's amazing how this proportion is repeated over

and over again in a beautiful face and the same thing with Zara,

if I do the width of her mouth, sorry, I'll do it again,

I'm a surgeon I'm used to sharp things,

I hardly ever cut myself, okay, so, so if I do the width of her mouth

to the width of her face the camera should be able to see that this,

the width of the mouth is 1.618 times the distance

from the mouth to the corner of the cheek

And it is

Anyway, this relationship holds up over and over again in the face

and Zara's a great example, that's why she's so pretty

So Zara's face fits the golden ratio

And the golden ratio 1 to 1.618 seems to apply to all beautiful faces

Now, this idea that maths can explain a beautiful face, any beautiful face,

has been taken even further by Stephen Marquardt

So, if I look at the nose the nose is a triangle and the front,

and the side view the nose is a triangle again

And in a beautiful face the sides of the triangle are 1.618 times

greater than the base and from a triangle you can build a pentagon

What's the most attractive configuration of the face,

the most attractive expression?

Smiling, when I smile you start to see the pentagons here

Oh, yes I do, there, it's there, there, there

Right, exactly

Stephen Marquardt combined pentagons and triangles,

all with the 1.618 ratio, and built a mask

He claims that the closer a face

conforms to his mask the more beautiful it is

Start with Kate Moss

Now Kate looks totally different than the others,

but if I put the mask on her you can see that it's very close

Now, the interesting thing about Kate is that her eyes are preternaturally wide

or unusually wide, her eyebrows fit beautifully,

her lips, her nose, her jaw line, very, very nice,

even the hairline is exactly what it should be

And it's not just women

The same mask can be put on men and Tom Cruise fits it perfectly

In fact, Stephen claims it fits any human face, so long as it's beautiful

Here's one of my favourite actors, star of stage, screen and television,

let me just see how he fits, oh, what a handsome guy

Oh, it's Paul Newman

It is Paul Newman, wait a moment,

it's better than Paul Newman, it's John Cleese

Don't tell me that, he's got a moustache grid...

To my surprise, it didn't fit my face at all,

though Stephen had a good excuse for me

Quite frankly, it's very masculine,

you'll see that in a man the eyes in there...

the eyes are always narrower in a man, your eyes are narrower than the grid,

the lips are thinner and you can see your lips are thinner here

and your nose is narrow just like the grid

and actually your nose is a little shorter...

which is good actually

Having discovered the mask Dr Marquardt was able to successfully use it

as a template when reconstructing patient's facial deformities

Now, Elizabeth Hurley, she's almost as good-looking as you but,

let's see, I think, oh my gosh, that's pretty darn close

The eyebrows are just in the upper edge of the mask

giving this nice arch, it looks beautiful...

Don't tell her, she'll be unbearable

lt'll be our secret

The cheeks are perfect, the nose fits beautifully in there, the lips,

the width of the lips is great, the lower has beautiful curvature,

the chin and jaw line is great, it's just remarkable how it fits

So Elizabeth's face is absolutely perfect apparently,

personally I think her nose is a bit pointy, but...

John!

Not you Elizabeth, another Elizabeth

So, that's everything that we can say about beauty that's universally true

So now we need to look at all that stuff about beauty

being in the eye of the beholder, or in this case,

the beholder being in the eye of the beauty

In other words, stuff that varies from place to place and from era to era

- yes, folks, we're entering the world of fashion

Take the fashions in skin tone, for centuries in Europe

looking pale was extremely fashionable

Elizabeth I used a mixture of white lead and vinegar to look as pale as possible

Unfortunately it was poisonous and it had a tendency to run

Then, four hundred years later, the suntan was suddenly in

Previously it was a sign of a common type who worked outdoors with his hands,

yuk; but now a suntan meant you were wealthy enough to travel

to the sun for your holidays

The fact that so much, a film was made in Hollywood in the fifties and sixties

had incredible influence nationally on the thought that

a tanned appearance was healthy and was good and was beautiful

So the suntan came in and now is beginning to go out of fashion

But is there any more to it than just fashion?

Dr Ramachandran s bravely prepared to hazard a biological

explanation for preferring pale skin

Every medical student is taught that anaemia, cyanosis,

which means a bluish tint of the skin, and jaundice,

which means a yellowish discolouration of the skin,

is much easier to detect in a fairer skinned person

especially a blonde than in a brunette,

so from a distance of twenty feet you can say if the blonde is anaemic

because she's pale skin,

whereas a brunette can disguise this fact and fool you

So in a sense a brunette is saying, come and mate with me,

but you don't know if she's anaemic or not, whereas a blonde,

there's truth in advertising, the blonde is saying, look,

I'm healthy, I'm pink, come and spread your genes, mate with me

So, even a fashion like pale skin may have a biological underpinning

Take hair. A full head of lustrous hair is a sign of youth,

vitality and health but the fashions in hairstyles

change all the time, unpredictably

For example, in 1624 Louis Xlll lost his hair

and had to wear a wig when he was king

The entire French court instantly followed the new fashion

and soon developed it beyond recognition

until the wigs became so large that some of them were sublet

Between the demands of fashion and

the desire to obey our biological hard wiring,

the need to present ourselves as youthful, healthy and fertile,

we all spend a huge fortune every year on our beauty;

but is all this fuss about beauty really justified?

Well, for young people it makes a lot of sense,

essentially what they're looking for is pretty basic

When you're young you don't care about mental beauty,

my mother would always try to fix me up with the girl,

the lady at church's daughter who was a great piano player,

that's the last thing I wanted to do, exactly, made her own clothes,

isn't that wonderful, she likes to read - "oh great mum, I can't wait"

So, I was looking for a beautiful, you know,

a beautiful girl who was the prom queen...

Who fitted the bill

Exactly, I didn't care if she had a brain or not,

I was attracted to beauty and young people are attracted to beauty

So when you're young, looks are really important,

but what happens when you grow a little older?

When people are seeking a partner,

a serious one not a himbo or a bit of fluff,

you know, some flibbertigibbet for a bit of fun on a Saturday night, yuk!

So, what are the things that we're really looking for in a long-term partner?

My study of thirty-seven cultures, looks is about,

physical attractiveness is third or fourth in importance

Men, when they're doing mate selection,

they look for partners who are intelligent, who are kind,

who are understanding, who are dependable, who are attractive

but also who are healthy and emotionally stable,

there are a large collage of characteristics

that come into play in long-term mating

that don't really come into play in short term mating

Thank you darling, it's beautiful

Good, good, good

Is the other one for me too?

No, no, no, that's for my mistress

Mistress? You have a mistress? You never told me?

It's not important

I didn't know you had a mistress

Oh, I see her only what, every two weeks you know,

it's not important, it's only for sex, just for sex

Well who is she? Anyone I know?

She's a showgirl, Morris has one too

Your business partner has a mistress?

They're in the same show Pass the salt please

Can I see her?

Of course, if you're interested, why not, why not?

Which one is she?

Who?

Your mistress?

Oh, ah, the brunette, third from the left.

And which is Morris's?

The blonde on the end

Ours is better

I think so

A man doesn't have to be good looking,

a man needs personality and a big wallet, we all know this

Look at these men who marry these women, these little short,

and they've got these gorgeous women and they really think the girl likes them?

So, as we get older we don't get quite so high on beauty

Here I am again, getting high on Elizabeth,

about 5' 6"high 5' 8" actually

Oh, honestly, if I'd known she was going to be so touchy...

What?

Nothing

John?

Later. So, if beauty gives us pleasure how come then

that it also makes people miserable

Miserable?

Will you shut up you old bat!

Stop interrupting

Faces like hers are becoming a problem because...

As I was going to say, faces like hers can be a problem

if we compare our looks and then start feeling inadequate

Even attractive people sometimes find themselves doing this

There's just posters of beautiful people everywhere, no one ugly

Beauty used to be rare, now it's everywhere, that's not helpful

In ancestral times, in small-group living,

a man wouldn't have encountered very many attractive women,

basically it would have been a dozen to two dozen potential mates to start with,

only a few of whom would be very attractive...

And now we're surrounded by it

Now we're surrounded by it, thousands and thousands,

in some cases millions of potentially attractive partners

What that does to men is that it decreases the commitment that

they feel toward their regular partner and then they look at the models,

they look at their regular mate and they think,

there's a better mate out there for me

And even if you're lucky enough to be one of the beautiful people

there can be disadvantages

For example, if things come too easily,

you may end up wondering if your looks are all there is to you

When I was quite young, my father, he said,

"You know Candice, he said, it's the beautiful women who are unhappy,

it's the beautiful women who commit suicide"and I went,"gee, wow,

I hope I don't get to be beautiful because

that's going to be like a sort of death sentence" and he,

and he was sort of putting it, to say the least,

rather dramatically by way of saying,

it's really hard if you sort of hit forty-five or fifty and then you think,

"Oh, I have no personality, I'm going to have to make it on something else now"

and then it's really hard to find personality when you're that much older

because where do you look for one, you can't sort of borrow it

You know, I always thought that I'd be a much more talented actor

if I had a broken nose and I was a foot shorter,

I just thought if I, if I had that kind of squat, burly thing going,

I think I would be a lot more advanced in my technique of acting,

but and that's because of the shaming that goes on because you...

the shaming, the shaming, when you feel that shaming of,

maybe that you are too good-looking...

And it's a little bit of a gift anyway that

you can't really take credit for...

Yes, I mean, it pisses me off when they say I'm pretty...

What word would make you comfortable? Seriously?

Rugged, rugged, I always wanted to be rugged

Would you like me to punch you now live on television...

Yes please

...we could settle all these problems of yours

and then you could become a seriously good actor

I can just see this programme cutting that out

Fucking hell, love, look at him...

that guy's always fucking pissed me off

Somebody once said that beauty is the passport to success

but it's not a passport, it's a visa - it expires

and if you've built your life on your beauty,

what you do when you begin to lose your looks?

Well, you start thinking about plastic surgery

What a nerve!

I had my eyes, the bags taken out from under my eyes,

I had a full face lift, I had breasts lifted

and I had a face feel and I'm looking for anything else...

Now, I don't have a tooth left of my own in my head

and I've had a couple of hair transplants

- in fact if I'd been living in 1500 I'd look like this by now,

so I'm not pointing the finger at anyone who has cosmetic surgery,

but I did hear one reason why it maybe it's not such a great idea

It came from George Orwell, who once remarked:

"After the age of forty a man is responsible for his face"

In other words if you're young whether you're good looking

or not is just the luck of the draw

But as you get older your face begins to show the world

what sort of person you are because whatever your habitual expressions are;

kind, cheerful, mournful, embittered,

they start etching themselves onto your face,

so then your face starts telling people what sort of a human you are

Allowing this to happen maybe what people mean

by the phrase "growing old gracefully"

So if you're beautiful as you grow older, it's not a free gift,

it's because your face shows qualities that are timeless and that we all admire;

strength, kindness, dedication, wisdom,

enthusiasm and humour, intelligence, compassion

Now those faces are achievements whereas Elizabeth Hurley's?

Well, very nice to look at, of course,

but it doesn't mean she isn't a total shit

We'll just have to wait to see, good night...

Elizabeth, aaaargh!

Good night.

And next week, leading on from beauty, we'll be glancing at,

no, trying to glimpse, staring, taking a look that's it,

taking a look at fame, fame, not Georgie Fame, just fame

Thank you