Beauty is in the eye of the beer-holder !

Mankind has been debating the principles of aesthetics for thousands of years, but beauty still defies objective measurement.

The Ancient Greeks believed that facial beauty had specific characteristics. Plato wrote of the "golden proportion", according to which the width of the face should be two-thirds of its length — preferably accompanied by a nose no longer than the distance between the centre of the eyes.

We also know that symmetry is inherently attractive to the human eye. (It has been shown that babies spend more time looking at symmetrical faces than at asymmetrical ones.) So a face can seem beautiful simply because of the similarity between its left and right sides.

On the other hand, psychologists in Scotland have recently proposed that beauty may in fact be in the eye of the "beer holder" rather than the beholder. In a study involving students in 2003, they tested whether members of the opposite sex were rated as more attractive after the consumption of alcohol: both men and women who had drunk a moderate amount of alcohol rated members of the opposite sex as 25 % more attractive than did a sober group. This is caused by alcohol stimulating the nucleus accumbens , which is the part of the brain used to assess facial attractiveness.

based on an article in The Daily Mail (paper edition, 14 Nov 2007)