A strong indicator of physical beauty is averageness. The average man or average woman. Uh huh. Here we go. When images of human faces are averaged together to form a composite image, they become progressively closer to the ideal image and are perceived as more attractive. This was first noticed way back when in 1883, when the French statistician, anthropologist, early model train enthusiast, and psychometrician Blaise Rousseau chose, for some still unknown reason, to overlay photographic composite images of the faces of vegetarians and criminals to see if there was a typical facial appearance for each. How in the world did he come up with that you ask? I will tell you how. When doing this, he noticed that the composite images were more attractive compared to any of the individual images.
