Beauty by Design

LOS ANGELES (CBS) August 5, 2007 — The poet Khalil Bibran tells us that beauty is not in the face but in the heart. Try telling that to the millions who spend billions pursuing physical beauty.

But can attractiveness be reduced to a formula-replicated design? Or is beauty something only an artist can create?

High in the hills above Los Angeles, an artist lives in a house surrounded by gardens of his own design. Richard Ellenbogen, who also writes music, spent his college years studying to be a painter, until he switched to medicine.

"I became a doctor in my spare time," he told Early Show national correspondent Tracy Smith. "You know, I needed a hobby."

The former painter is now one of the most prominent cosmetic surgeons in Beverly Hills. His patients are his works of art.

"I can create beauty," he said. "I can give someone a 'wow.'"

But before he picks up a scalpel, Ellenbogen picks up his paint brush and uses a few dabs of color to show patients what their new faces will look like.

"The way I think of myself is, I make people happy," he said.

Jennifer Lee, a 30-year-old mother of two, hopes to be one of them. She wants a new look and has put her face in Dr. Ellenbogen's artistic hands.

"Dr. Ellenbogen was telling me that it's all about just making your nose match your face, she said. "He's not picturing what a perfect nose is, he's picturing how he can make my nose look, to go with the rest of my face."

Ellenbogen pioneered a technique called fat grafting. Instead of cutting and pulling, he injects the patient's own fat back into their faces and literally sculpts them a new face.

"I totally trust him," Lee said. "I trust him 100 percent."

Ellenbogen says that there is a general formula that he uses to design a nose.

"The nose should be exactly a 30-degree angle," he said. "The width of the nose should be no wider than the two points at the center — the center of the eye."

But it turns out that there is a more precise mathematical design for physical beauty: The phi mask, made up of interlocking geometric shapes that compose a perfectly proportioned face.

Dr. Steven Marquardt, who taught and practiced facial surgery for nearly three decades, found that out by studying fashion models' faces.

"As I started studying these faces, I found out that the width of the eyes is exactly the same, the width of the mouth, the thickness in the lips, the width of the nose. The more beautiful they were … they were like each other," Marquardt said. "It turned out they all could fit one way or another a certain pattern. As I worked with this pattern over years, I discovered there is a pattern. I didn't create this pattern. I want to be real clear that I didn't invent this pattern or create it. I just realized this [about] how faces are made."

Marquardt's mask is sometimes used as a template for people considering cosmetic surgery. To show how the mask works, he used Smith's face.

According to the mask, her jaw line was too wide, her upper lip was too prominent, and eyebrows were all wrong.

For Ellenbogen's patient Jennifer, it turns out that less was more. Two weeks after surgery, the change is visible but subtle, and she thinks it's beautiful.

It has long been said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and thought that beauty varies by race, culture or era. The evidence, however, shows that our perception of physical beauty is hard wired into our being and based entirely on how closely one's features reflect phi in their proportions. Take another look at beauty through the eyes of medical science.

Dr. Stephen Marquardt has studied human beauty for years in his practice of oral and maxillofacial surgery. Dr. Marquardt performed cross-cultural surveys on beauty and found that all groups had the same perceptions of facial beauty. He also analyzed the human face from ancient times to the modern day. Through his research, he discovered that beauty is not only related to phi, but can be defined for both genders and for all races, cultures and eras with the beauty mask which he developed and patented. This mask uses the pentagon and decagon as its foundation, which embody phi in all their dimensions. For more information and other examples.

Even with a perfectly proportioned face though, there are endless variations in coloring and the shapes of each facial feature (eyes, eyebrows, lips, nose, etc.) that give rise to the distinctive appearance of each race and provide for endless variations in beauty that are as unique as each individual.

The human face communicates an incredible array of emotions which are an integral element of one's total beauty. The human face conforms most closely to phi proportions when we smile. You'll be perceived as more beautiful with a warm smile than with a cold-hearted look of anger, arrogance or contempt.