The above article is an incredibly long report on how people of both genders percieve "average-ness." The conclusion that the article made was that people found an assortment of average faces to be more attractive than an assortment of less attractive and more attractive faces.
This procedure revealed that average faces were judged to be more physically
attractive than the individual faces that made up the average and, furthermore,
the attractiveness of a multi-face composite increased with the number of faces
comprising the average
I was interested at what the article defined as "average." Apparently, that just means that the face is...in every sense of the word...'average.' The proportions and sizes of each individual feature is strictly numerically average. Feature placement is determined by previous studies that sampled a large group of peoples' feature measurements.
That's all for now- I'll keep looking up articles on the Psychology database.
The above link is fascinating. It allows you to select people and average together their faces.
I think one of the problems with this idea of "average" and "above average" is that people strive to become more beautiful- to have the "right" measurements through plastic surgery. This is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen- a calculator that tells you whether you need a nose job or not: http://www.calculatorslive.com/NoseSizeCalculator.aspx
