The average faces of women in different countries
The actual artist's methodology:
http://pmsol3.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/world-of-averages-eur...
> I used this site: http://www.faceresearch.org/demos/average
> I used no one I thought was under 20 and no one I thought was over 50. I used any internet source I could to get about 15-20 pictures each composite. The hardest thing is finding that many pictures of good frontal shots. Most people take pictures at an angle.
> It is also not always easy to find pictures of every nationality. At times I would use Google Image and type in the 10 most common last names for a nationality. For Latin America, where names are shared, I would use the most common last names for that country and put the country name in the search. I would try to verify that the person is at least in that country or from it (not easy). That was especially tricky with the UK (English, Welsh, etc) and Irish.
> Strangely for some nationalities it was easier to find men than women or vice versa. For example, very easy to find pictures of Italian men, but not women. It is very easy to find pictures of French women, but not men, etc.
> Anyway, for every composite I think I viewed at least a couple of thousand photos. :-(
The fact that some very individually distinctive features are still present on some pictures (why do some of these faces smile, and some don't?), I would guess that the number of pictures that was averaged was ridiculously low, 10 maybe.
The result is therefore all about the original ~10 pictures that were chosen... and it is certainly not an "average face" (which would require a statistically representative sample, north of 10k for most countries). Chose 10 other people from the same ethnicity and you get a different face.
Critique of these images: http://jezebel.com/5758201/see-the-average-face-of-women-fro...
Purported origin of the work: http://faceresearch.org/
The real origin of these:
Remember that this is not what the average female will look like in these countries. It's actually the physical average of the faces of a sampled group.
Funny that China is the only country where they specify the ethnic group, even though many other countries in that list have sizable ethnic minorities.
The comments downthread that point out that this submission appears not to be from the original source (contrary to HN guidelines) are helpful, as are the comments describing the original source methodology and critiques of that methodology. I'm not at all sure that there is reliable data here.
That page needs to add an explanation. I've seen similar images before, but nearly every commenter on that site seems to think that they selected a bunch of really hot women to represent what the average woman should look like and posted the pictures to make people feel bad.
The software uses a default face, if you go to http://faceresearch.org/demos/average
You can see that even picking to very lopsided in the same way face, like Right eye higher than left, and mouth off center, results in a face that looks good when averaged.
The method they are using is clearly flawed.
I found it interesting that you can see faint traces of where some of the sample images from Burmese/Myanmarese women were wearing thanaka. It seems like in a lot of other countries the sample images are likely to include that particular culture's makeup styles.
Funny not to capitalize country names, and why does India get a double entry? There are other places where geography correlates with different appearing faces too.
Where is the average American women?
Huh. Average shouldn't be that pretty for most of the countries :).
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im going to sweden and south africa.
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West Africa is my favorite country.
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Way prettier than my experience.
Poland was not high on my list of travel destinations, but, I mean, if the _average_ woman looks like that ;-)