Looking Good

And so on. The most famous representation of the Golden Mean is Leonardo's drawing "Vitruvian Man" -- the one with the nude fellow inside a circle, arms and legs outstretched like spokes in a wheel. The golden ratio is everywhere: the distance from the top of the figure's head to the middle of his chest is 1.618 times the length of the head alone. The distance from the top of his head to his navel is 1.618 times the distance from his head to the middle of the chest, and so on. But others have perceived the ratio in the architecture of the Pantheon, the bones of the fingers, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and the very structure of the DNA molecule itself (the length versus the width, among many other measurements).

Marquardt still takes delight in his own discovery that the combined width of the two upper front teeth in a model-perfect smile is 1.618 times the height of each tooth. Eventually, he decided to use phi to build a template for the perfect face. With a computer, he generated a number of shapes using key facial features (pupils, corners of the mouth, bridge of the nose, etc.) as endpoints. The triangles, pentagons and decagons that resulted were all based on the 1:1.618 ratio. Putting that all together, he created a "mask" of ideal beauty. He called the finished product his "beauty mask" or "phi mask."

The real test came when he assembled hundreds of pictures of acclaimed beauties, from today's superstars back in time to Nefertiti herself. His "mask" fit with uncanny precision onto face after face after face -- white, black, Asian, Hispanic, ancient, contemporary. In the distances from jaw to brow, from lip to nostril, from nose to eye socket and so on and so forth, he found, again and again, that magic ratio.

"We believe that it is not strictly an image of 'beauty,'" Marquardt explains on his Web site, "but actually an image of humanness." Moths use smell to locate other moths to mate with, he says. Dolphins find other dolphins by sound. We find human mates by looking instinctively for the Golden Mean, and the more closely a human conforms to this proportion, the more "beautiful" -- that is, ideal for mating -- that person appears.

The idea seems rather New Age-y, even daffy, until you see how neatly that mask slides over those beautiful faces. Then you understand why his findings are discussed at scholarly conferences and cited in academic journals. Your mother may have told you pretty is as pretty does, but Marquardt and his calipers say she's wrong.

I thought Cupid aimed his dart

Deep into my fevered heart;

Instead the arrow's lusty path

Was predetermined by . . . math.

My jasper heartthrob in the art museum also rattled my belief that today's Americans are more obsessed with physical appearance than previous societies have been. I had taken this belief for granted until then, and it's hard to shake off entirely. The number of cosmetic procedures performed on Americans has risen roughly 500 percent over the past decade, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, and last year 11 million procedures were done. (For the record, the vast majority of these did not involve Mary Tyler Moore.) These procedures averaged more than $1,000 a pop, not counting the intangible costs -- the needle stabs, scalpel incisions, anesthesia, stitches, bruising, swelling and so on.

Operations involving jabbing, scraping or polishing were most popular: Botox injections, Restylane shots, laser hair removal, facial peels -- that sort of thing. Patients going under the knife were partial to liposuction, breast enlargements, and eye and nose jobs.

But no frontier of the body went unscrutinized. "As my feet settle into middle age, their unfortunate condition is such that public exposure is no longer an option," Betsy Berne bravely confessed to Vogue readers recently. Berne visited with Manhattan podiatrist Suzanne Levine, whose foot-beautification program includes "extensive buffing, whitening of nails using Levine's exclusive bleaching agent . . . laser rejuvenation to lessen the appearance of spider veins . . . mesotherapy to reduce heavy ankles; microdermabrasion . . . injectable fillers to plump up worn balls of the feet and to resculpt misshapen toes; laser hair removal; and ambulatory surgery."