There are separate polls for male and female readers. Comments will open when the results are announced.
UPDATE (March 31): The results are now in:
MEN: Left: 369 (77%), Right: 109 (23%)
WOMEN: Left: 125 (58%), Right: 89 (42%)
Feel free to give your explanations for the findings, voice your preferences and the reasons for them, or speculate about what each of these two women represent!
UPDATE (April 1):
The names for search engines: Katherine Heigl, Alessandra Ambrosio, Kate Beckinsale, Eva Mendes, Jessica Alba, Scarlett Johansson, Jessica Biel, Marisa Miller, Ginger Rogers, Joan Fontaine, Jennifer Jones, Joan Crawford, Olivia de Havilland, Loretta Young, Jane Wyman.
The woman on the right looks like she might have been a movie star during the "Golden Age of Hollywood" from about 1920-1950. The face on the left represents a more modern ideal.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the above post. The left has a more raw sexual attraction while the one on the right has a more subdued beauty.
ReplyDeleteI prefer the one on the right - but then I like beautiful eyes, and the one on the left doesn't have them, and further to my mind looks, dull and cheap.
ReplyDeleteI'm going on a limb here to say that the woman on the left represents the modern ideal of beauty, while the woman on the right represents the past ideal of beauty (around 1920s-1930s perhaps).
ReplyDeleteI agree with ogden salti.
ReplyDeleteThe left woman is more beautiful in modern terms while the right one for older tastes.
I asked my father who is 68 years old who he prefers most and he told me the right one. The same did his brother who is 64 years old!!!
Anyway the post should had a third alternative for people who consider the two women as equally beautiful.
I am too late to vote but would have voted for the one on the left. I'm female.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the other posts; the one on the right looks 1930s-ish and the one on the left more modern, but with roughly the same facial proportions.
I am stumped as to the hypothesis that Dienekes is testing via sex-specific voting, though...
Karin,
ReplyDeleteI think it obvious what Dienekes is measuring??
The face on the left is more masculine than the one on the right by quite a bit - so he is attempting to measure how masculine a female face different genders prefer?!
>> I am stumped as to the hypothesis that Dienekes is testing via sex-specific voting, though...
ReplyDeleteNo hypothesis, just thought it might be interesting if men and women voted differently, which they did, even though the left one won in both sexes.
The face on the left would interest me for a night, the one on the right for an eternity...
ReplyDeleteNire aitaren etxea defendituko dut
Damn I missed the vote. I'm a young guy but I would have picked the right for the exact reason that bo7156 stated. The one on the left has more Asian looking eyes. The one on the right looks more European, that is older 'true' European.
ReplyDeleteOk as you said Asian look.
ReplyDeleteIn Asia ( non Mongoloid part) the typical picture of woman's face is the one on right for ages.
Recently with TV and models the face on the left is increasing in its popularity.
I remember reading about Monica Lewinsky being very popular in Iraq.
Somehow the look on the left is seen as aggressive and the look on the right as soothing presence and friendly.
How do we classify Roman, Greek and Indian sculptures
left or right?.
The question we should ask the good lieutenant is whence came these photographs.
ReplyDeleteThey appear to be composites but of whom from where?
That will reveal much about why we are attracted to one more than the other.
The one on the left is very much like my first wife who is of Magyar, Irish Jewish and German descent.
The woman on the right is much like an Armenian woman whom I love.
She could also be any one of my female relatives from Gipuzkoa.
The face is hauntingly familiar.
Nire aitaren etxea defendituko dut
Karin what do you mean when you say you are female?
ReplyDeleteAre you man or woman?
You had to answer to the question as it went!
The poll was for either men or women.
There was no poll for....female or male!!!
Truly what do you mean by saying female?
>> Karin what do you mean when you say you are female?
ReplyDeleteA good dictionary always helps
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/female
See female[2,noun]
Last time i checked i asked Karin and not Dienekes about what does female mean in the particular comment.
ReplyDeleteI have my reasons for doing so.
I'm female and voted for the face on the right, there's a greater 'mystery'. I think it's a pic of 1930's movie star Norma Shearer.
ReplyDeleteThe one on the left looks cheap & common to my taste.
The old school women have more natural looking hair styles, and bigger, more rounded eyes as well as nicer more defined cheek bones. The modern women just look greasy to me. BTW my vote is for old school lady, Loretta Young. She looks like a fun lovin' gal. Probably likes the country too.
ReplyDeleteI am a male and I thought the face on the right was much more attractive. The right composition looks much more sensual and the eyes are bigger and more feminine. The left's lips and face just look more cold overall
ReplyDeleteMy wife made an interesting point. Most of the women on the left have their mouth open, and a more vacant look about them, which has been proven more attractive to a lot of men.
ReplyDeleteThe one on the left had a more overall better face shape, though the one on the right has better lips and eyes. The left one has weird eyes, caused maybe by the composite. Their noses I dont care for.
ReplyDeletePersonally I prefer neither of these two. Marrying the obviously empty, selfish woman on the left would be a quick way to divorce; the woman on the right is too submisive and somehow "internally boring". If I were to choose, I would pick the right one, but not too willingly.
ReplyDeleteThose are some hefty assumptions to pull from a simple picture war lord. Although I obviously get personal impressions from the pictures as well, I think it might be too hasty to draw a scarlet letter on the woman on the left.
ReplyDeleteFirst it must be said this is a piss poor composite; it is clear that the images are not equally weighted. Jessica Biel's image dominates the composite on the left and Olivia DeHavilland's image dominates the composite on the right.
ReplyDeleteOf course the modern image on the left is more attractive; her expression is sexually charged and seductive. The image on the right (from the sexually repressed 30s) looks more like a mom or an aunt (if not a nun).
The woman on the left seems to be saying “fuck me hard, big boy” whereas the woman on the left is probably carrying a tray of lemonade and cookies. It's an inane comparison.
... uh, that is the woman on the RIGHT is probably carrying the tray of lemonade and cookies.
ReplyDeleteOh hell... I'd do 'em both - at the same time if I could - but I'd be tempted to use a rubber with the one on the left.
>> First it must be said this is a piss poor composite; it is clear that the images are not equally weighted. Jessica Biel's image dominates the composite on the left and Olivia DeHavilland's image dominates the composite on the right.
ReplyDeleteAll source images are equally weighted. Also note that the de Havilland sisters (Olivia and Joan Fontaine) make up 2/7 of the 40's sample, so it makes sense that it woul resemble them somewhat.
I think they both look foreign,so I find it hard to think they are very pretty.Pretty is something I feel safe with and these two chicks look foreign and foreign is dangerous and remote to me. They look like they come from a Spanish and Slavik republik and that's rather remote.But the left seems more sultry and modern such as men's fantasy's like and they right seems more 1920's wise,sly type,yet namby-pamby
ReplyDeleteI think that something that may have skewed at least bit is a weird resulting expression of the composite of the 1940s, looking somewhat sad and afraid, while the other resulted in a seductive face.
ReplyDeleteBut even so, overall I find the newer generation ones more attractive, I don't think it would have been much difference without this accident. Maybe with a few substitutions, like replacing almost anyone by Hedi Lamarr in the 1940's team could have made the things somewhat more balanced.
I have a question regarding the methodology in creating these composites. How does it work? You put all the faces at once and the program will create a really uniform composite, somewhat analogue to what I think that would result from a sort of "tournament" of composites (composite of Mary and Lucy is composed against the composite of Joan and Jannet), or does it goes linarly (first creates a composite of Mary and Lucy, which is then composed against Joan, which is then composed Against Janet)?
I'm asking because the first one looks like predominantly a composite of Katherine Heigl and Alessandra Ambrosio, as if they're were the last ones on the line of a linear sequence. But may be just an impression.
In this particular instance you average over all of them at once, although the tournament approach is also possible.
ReplyDeleteI chose that on the right , looks much more delicate and innocent , moreover she has bigger eyes , in one word she's more feminine than that on the left , definitely.
ReplyDeleteFor me, it's the one on the left. But it's all in the facial shape. The one on the left has a super model's facial shape. I
ReplyDeleteswitched the facial shapes. Now the 40s face with the modern facial shape looks better than the modern face with the 40s facial shape.
Most of the women from the earlier generation seem to have more tenderness and emotion in their eyes; the ones from today seem more cold, steely and conniving.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI don't have your skill in making composites, but using an online morphing site I made a composite of 8 of the women considered the most beautiful in the 1930s and 1940s, Ava Gardner, Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman, Marlene Dietrich, Hedy LaMarr, Linda Darnell, Rita Hayworth, and Joan Crawford. I think this is a much more comparable sample than the best actress winners. However there is still a big difference between 'hottest' and 'most beautiful.' Often not the same.
ReplyDeleteHere are the results
8beautiesmorph
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteWow, I'm surprised at some of the reactions to these images. I'm female and Mexican and looking at the image on the left immediately reminded me of someone Hispanic. I think it's because of the eyes being narrower than the image on the right, maybe a trait coming from our Amerindian heritage. But narrowed eyes are also associated with sexual arousal, so the face she is making with the parted lips looks like the kind of expression half-naked women in men's magazines have. The comments made, "dull and cheap", "would interest me for a night", "aggressive", "greasy" etc weren't what would come to my mind at all. (And "greasy" is a slur for Hispanics; I don't know if that was deliberately meant as such or not.) I have to wonder, if the narrowed eye shape is associated with sexual attraction, then does this contribute on a subconscious level to stereotypes of Latin women as being promiscuous and oversexed.
ReplyDeleteThe woman on the left has a much better developed facial bone structure and I find her much sexier, however the one on the right does have certain edges.
ReplyDeleteThe women on the left is clearly more masculine, which says a lot about the transition to modern preferences, that is people are becoming much more promiscuous.