AI has made many of the questions we face on a daily basis easy to answer. The way AI alogorithms frame and organize responses help us to quickly consider the pertinent issues and formulate a decision. The value of AI comes from the fact that it can compile and synthesize information much more quickly than we can alone, but when it comes to making aesthetic recommendations, some limitations do present themselves.
AI chatbots such as Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT can measure facial proportions and compare them to established canons of ideal proportions: vertical thirds, horizontal fifths, medial canthal to alar relationship, canthal tilt, et cetera. It can even take your photos and videos and generate simulations of potential changes that would mimic these more “ideal” facial proportions. While the results image may look great enough for you to share on your Instagram and Tik Tok, it doesn’t tell the full story.
Contemporary beauty standards can’t simply be distilled into a single set of measurements or a collection of angles. The Golden Ratio should be applied within the context of an individual patient’s anatomy, ethnicity and personal beauty standards and not simply on the amalgamation of hundreds of people considered “attractive” to determine a single defining algorithm.
An easier way to contextualize this would be to determine a perfect or Golden Ratio for the length of hair that makes a woman attractive. Some women look beautiful with short hair. Some women look beautiful with long hair. Many women look beautiful with hair that hair is any length in between. Now imagine taking the measurements of all these beautiful womens’ hair, averaging them, and calling those single average measurements the optimal hair length for beauty. As silly as it sounds, a hundred years ago when plastic surgery textbooks began creating these idealized ratios, measurements and angles for facial aesthetics, that’s exactly what they did. They simply chose individuals they felt were “attractive”, made measurements of their features, and spit out average numbers that then represented the gold standard of beauty.
Fast forward to today, and AI does essentially the same thing with your facial analysis. It can measure your face, compare to other averaged measurements of people considered beautiful, and tell you what is off. While it may provide some information, it lacks the context of your individual beauty ideals, anatomy and how this truly affects your facial balance outside of simple numbers.
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The other caveat of asking AI about facial balancing recommendations? AI does not make any accurate assessments of the bony and soft tissue anatomy. It’s easy to move pixels around on a digital image in 2 dimensions. Whether it’s possible to create the same effect in real life is a different story.
So for now, AI learning algorithms still have a ways to go before becoming as accurate as an experienced plastic surgeon focusing on facial balance and harmony rather than simple measurments.
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