Last year, supermodel Bella Hadid was named the most beautiful woman in the world, and now she is joined by her male counterpart, actor Robert Pattinson, who has just been anointed the “most handsome man in the world.”
These ultimately meaningless distinctions come to us from tabloidy British outlet the Daily Mail, which makes its determinations based on the dubiously “scientific” and openly retrograde beauty standard known as the “Golden Ratio of Beauty Phi.”
This exhaustingly regressive tradition has been popularized in recent years by cosmetic surgeon Dr. Julian De Silva, who uses the ratio — a measure of physical perfection apparently adapted from the “golden ratio” used by Renaissance artists and architects hundreds of years ago — to reaffirm that celebrities already widely celebrated for conforming to modern western beauty standards are, in fact, attractive.
The formula is roughly the same every time this happens. De Silva hands down his pick to the Daily Mail, various other outlets run the story under some variation of the headline: “Breaking: Hot Celebrity Is Hot,” punchier outlets point out the many flaws (racism, Eurocentrism, gendered notions tied to the words “beautiful” and “handsome,” the privileging of physical appearance, the fact that the rise of plastic surgery has increasingly made conforming to western beauty ideals possible only for the very wealthy, etc. etc.) with presenting a form of pseudo-science based on centuries-old western ideas of beauty that are supposedly representative of the entire world as mathematical evidence that those Eurocentric beauty standards are in, fact, objectively correct, and then we all forget about it until it’s time for the Daily Mail to pick a new hottest whatever in the world
Anyway, congratulations are in order to attractive man Robert Pattinson on being the most attractive, according to “science.”
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