How does the average ethnic groups' faces look like – and how does the 'face of tomorrow'?
Average faces of England
The Face of Tomorrow is a series of photos which address the effects of globalization on identity.
The project takes photos of people in various countries and merges them into an average face. The large cities of the world attract migrants from all parts of the planet resulting in new mixtures of peoples. What might a typical person look like in a few hundred years if they continue to integrate more and more?
Average faces of Germany
The population in cities such as Istanbul in Turkey, which has seen thousands of years of influx of people from Greece, Rome, Arabia and Central Asia is fairly uniform. This sugges that if one could combine all the faces in a city right now, one might be looking at the future face of that area.
Average faces of Chile
Istanbul based artist and photographer Mike Mike takes photos of current inhabitants, and merges them into a 'typical face'. What he gets is a new person – a mix of all the people in that city. A 'future face' which might indeed be the face of tomorrow!
Average faces of Brazil.
And what happens when one compares different subgroups at the same location? Here an example of Australia:
Average faces of Australia taken at Sydney University
Average faces of Australia taken at Sydney's Bondi Beach.
Do the university faces indeed look somewhat more 'intelligent' – or is it the other way around?
And here the international list of the average women's faces:
One of the most interesting findings from this project is that the composite face is mostly much better looking than any of the individuals.
Mike concludes that there's an underlying beauty in each of us that has the potential to come through. He claims that in every instance this seems to be the case – in each city the composite face is more beautiful than almost any of the individuals that make it up.
The process of merging the faces and coming up with someone new is really exciting. Archetypal creative stuff. You end up with a new person. Someone who didn't exist before. Someone who doesn't exist now. But someone who is nonetheless quite real.
(Mike Mike)
Find out more about this fascinating project on Mike's site: Faceoftomorrow.org
Very interesting. What if you blotted out the names of the countries and asked people which face they found most attractive? (That would then tell you which country has the most beautiful women in the world).
Really interesting stuff, thanks for the heads up. What i find most striking is the absolutely normal look of the average faces, despite the often huge diversity of the faces used to generate them.
And how will the average American woman look like?