How to Use the Facial Beauty Mask
First, make sure you have an appropriate photo of yourself. Here are the directions for how to take a photo to use with the facial beauty ratio mask, as described by Marquardt Beauty Analysis:
Face directly into the camera so that your face isn’t turned right or left even slightly. Place the tips of your index fingers gently against the holes in your ears, keeping your fingers straight and horizontal. Do not put your fingers into your ears. Now, tilt your head up or down until the bottoms of your right and left irises (the round colored part of your eye) are aligned on the top of an imaginary line connecting the tops of your index fingers, as shown below:
With a relaxed face and without smiling, place your back teeth together so that they barely touch and bring your lips together, until they touch gently. Note: Your head will seem to be tilted slightly down.
The original researchers suggested photocopying the beauty mask onto acetate paper and shrinking or enlarging it until it fit best with your face. This is certainly an option, but in today’s world, it’s probably easier to do this using Photoshop. If you’d like to approach it the old-fashioned way, you can download the original facial beauty mask by clicking the thumbnail below.
If you want to use Photoshop, I’ve created a *.psd document that can be easily imported and overlaid on a photo of your own face. Click here to download that.
However you decide to do it, here are the researcher’s instructions for matching it up with your face:
On the photo of your face:
Create a line connecting the center of your right and left pupils (the round black center part of your eyes). This is your pupil line.
Create a second line connecting the right and left corners of your mouth. This is your lip line.
Create a third line connecting the middle (or center) of your pupil line with the middle (or center) of your lip line. This is your facial vertical line.
Take your copy of the mask and enlarge or shrink it on a copy machine until the facial vertical line (the vertical distance from the lip line to the pupil line) on the mask is the same as that distance on your face photo.
Once you’ve matched up the facial vertical line, you can easily see where your own face differs from the “beauty” archetype. To learn how to use makeup to compensate for some of these differences, check out our makeup tips here.
