In the Eye of the Coder

“a definitive, quantified measure of your appeal, as measured by the computer, the ultimate objective eye, but without the inherent competitiveness of being measured against other people”

“But if “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” as the aphorism has it, what happens when the beholder is a computer? What power does that seemingly objective beholder share with the beautiful, or the not beautiful? And what does the ability to be seen through a computer’s eyes say about the desire to be seen by our fellow humans?”

“The golden ratio and beauty apps seem made for each other: Computer vision of any sort must rely upon algorithms, and the golden ratio provides a logic for them. It’s in sync with the Aristotelian concept of beauty, in which beauty is presumed to be objectively definable and therefore measurable. Beauty, by this definition, is order, symmetry, and definiteness. Beauty isn’t glamour; it’s math.”

“Scrolling through these reviews from disappointed users—and from the occasional pleased user too—you begin to see a pattern: People want to believe there’s an objective measure of beauty, but they don’t like to think that the measure applies to them.”

“Users are eager to believe that objective assessment is possible, but when they are being assessed, the algorithm must be off, the facial recognition not good enough, the code not quite finished. The app is wrong.”

“Of course, these apps are self-evidently terrible.”

“Given that we tend to frame women’s relationship with beauty as being self-flagellating, it might be hard to believe that anyone would turn to these apps for joy, and at first glance the displeasure in the reviews seems to reflect this.”

“But pleasure is the essence of these apps, even for users who rated it poorly. The pleasure they provide doesn’t come from their giving an objective answer to how beautiful we are, but in letting us pose the question and then reject the answer if we want to.”

“They give us an opportunity to know for certain that beauty is real and that it matters—while at the same time letting us regard ourselves as an exception.”

“The usefulness of computer vision is not in its objectivity but in its ultimate absurdity, which makes it so easy to rebut.”

“If you’ve ever been tempted by curiosity or vanity to download one of these math-driven beauty apps, you might think you’re casting a ballot for the Aristotelian concept of beauty. But if the joy of these apps lies not in their objectivity but in the tension between our own vision and the computer’s, maybe we should look to a different philosopher to explain their appeal: Immanuel Kant.”

“The Kantian concept of beauty rests not on measurable parameters and harmonious ratios but on one’s aesthetic judgment, which struggles to free itself from merely subjective taste.”

“We may be swayed to find something beautiful because it moves us emotionally and personally, but this is always in tension with the detachment required to proclaim something beautiful and believe others will share our sentiment.”

“Some of the beauty of a thing rests not in the thing itself but in the process by which it is assessed.”

“From this perspective, a subjective response might be pleasing but it reveals no true beauty, which suggests why your average user might download a beauty app. If subjective responses were enough, anyone’s words of assurance would suffice. But there is a pleasure that beauty can give us beyond what the object in question provides directly, the pleasure in objectivity that we can take only in acts of judging themselves.”

“People use beauty apps not to actually quantify their appeal but to anticipate that quantification.”

“We look forward to the moment of judging as much as to the judgment itself.”

“From lived experience, we trust that beauty goes beyond what can be measured. But we don’t trust that fact so much that we ignore external, objective ideas of beauty that often circumscribe our lives.”

“Women’s lives in particular have been defined by the beauty standard, whether any given woman has tried to meet it, forget it, change it, or all of the above. And that beauty standard derives not from math but from power—a fact made plain by the way it sorts us hierarchically for ends not our own, with women who are attractive earning more in the workplace (unless they’re too attractive, which carries penalties of its own), being likelier to win court cases, and finding similarly attractive partners.”

“We seek objective truth about beauty not only to measure our own beauty against it but also to measure our own highly subjective concept of beauty against it as well, and even gather a sense that it might triumph.”

“Kant again: The pleasure of judgment lives not just in the theater of judgment but in getting to preside over the adjudication.”

“When researching this piece, the only app that prompted me to drop everything and immediately download it was Spruce, which hooks you up with a live, human dermatologist who recommends a treatment plan based on your selfies and sends a prescription to your pharmacy. I had fun with the goofy computer-vision apps, sure, but they’re gone from my phone now. Spruce remains.”

“Human attention is the goal. Machine attention is a break from having to constantly strive toward that goal.”

“The Shopko computer was a relief because for a change, I could think about beauty in a way that wasn’t about people at all. It was about inserting myself into this new world of makeup, seeing how my qualities intersected with this technology that was promising to grant me the know-how I hadn’t yet acquired, and getting 20 minutes of fun to boot. We weren’t in it to look better. We were in it for the game.”