Since 1990, PEOPLE magazine’s World’s Most Beautiful issue has celebrated the faces that defined each era. The inaugural issue featured Michelle Pfeiffer, whose subtle smile, softly defined curls, and natural makeup reflected the era’s beauty ideals.
Over the decades, the rotating faces on the cover have charted the shifting tides of Hollywood beauty standards, from Julia Roberts and Courteney Cox to fuller-lipped icons like Angelina Jolie, fit-mom glam like Jennifer Lopez, and pop royalty like Beyoncé.
More recently, the cover featured 61-year-old Demi Moore, whose timeless appeal sparked renewed conversation around beauty and age in the modern era.
But in today’s world, beauty isn’t just a matter of taste anymore. In 2023, Dr. Julian De Silva, a London-based celebrity plastic surgeon, used facial mapping technology to identify the most scientifically beautiful women on the planet.
De Silva named ten women whose faces most closely align with the Golden Ratio, a mathematical standard of symmetry and proportion. The ranking captured global attention for its scientific precision but reignited debate about whether beauty can be measured in numbers.
The Gold Standard for Facial Perfection
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The Golden Ratio, a mathematical formula defining “ideal” facial symmetry, is central to De Silva’s methodology.
It dates back to ancient Greece but gained modern fame through Renaissance artists like Leonardo da Vinci, who believed the formula created visual harmony.
According to this principle, the most attractive faces have proportions that closely align with the number 1.62, also known as Phi.
To calculate it, you divide the length of the face by its width. The closer the result is to Phi, the more “scientifically beautiful” the face is considered.
Critics argue it oversimplifies human beauty and ignores everything from cultural diversity to personal expression. But that hasn’t stopped De Silva from using it to rank celebrity faces.
Top Ten by the Numbers
10. HoYeon Jung – 89.63%
Squid Game star HoYeon Jung ranks tenth, scoring 89.63% on the Golden Ratio scale. According to De Silva’s facial mapping, her sharp eye shape, clean symmetry, and sculpted jawline helped push her into the top tier.
Beyond the sample math, her charisma on-screen and effortless fashion presence arguably do more heavy lifting than any algorithm could quantify.
9. Deepika Padukone – 91.22%
Bollywood superstar Deepika Padukone clocks in at 91.22%, with nearly perfect eyebrows scoring 95.2% on their own. Her slightly wider forehead and nose lowered the final tally, but De Silva’s numbers still place her firmly in global beauty royalty.
Beauty in Indian cinema has always embraced bold features and expressive emotion. Can a Western-rooted equation really grasp the full impact of her screen presence?
8. Kim Kardashian – 91.28%
Image credits: @kimkardashian
Kim Kardashian ranks eighth with a 91.28% Golden Ratio score. Her symmetrical features, bold bone structure, and contoured jawline reflect the aesthetic that defines beauty in the Instagram age.
Whether natural or enhanced, Kim’s face fits the formula. Some say she shaped the standard more than she follows it.
7. Jourdan Dunn – 91.39%
Jourdan Dunn ranks seventh with a 91.39% score, bolstered by strong cheek symmetry and near-perfect spacing between lips and nose. Her eye shape and face structure reportedly hit the Divine Proportion sweet spot at 97%.
However, De Silva’s numbers don’t measure presence, confidence, or what it means to be the face that redefined fashion for an entire generation of Black models.
6. Taylor Swift – 91.64%
Taylor Swift scores 91.64%, with strong lip and chin measurements carrying her up the list. A slightly longer nasal bridge kept her just outside the top five.
But let’s be honest, does anyone love Taylor for facial symmetry? The Golden Ratio didn’t write “All Too Well,” and it certainly doesn’t explain the kind of mass appeal that breaks records and stadium attendance.
5. Ariana Grande – 91.81%
Image credits: ulta.com
Ariana Grande lands in fifth place with a 91.81% score. De Silva praised her forehead and chin proportions as near-perfect, though her brow shape and nose-to-lip ratio pulled the score down slightly.
Grande’s image is almost cartoonishly symmetrical, but there’s also a softness and edge to her look that math can’t quite pin down, and maybe that’s why it works.
4. Beyoncé – 92.44%
Queen Bey ranks fourth with a 92.44% score. Her face shape earned an almost impossible 99.6%, with high marks for her lips, eyes, and brow zones. Only slight proportional differences between her lips and nose lowered her overall score.
Still, the idea that Beyoncé needs numbers to confirm her beauty feels off. Her presence alone could reset the Golden Ratio entirely.
3. Bella Hadid – 94.35%
Image credits: @bellahadid
Bella Hadid rounds out the top three with a 94.35% score. Her chin and eye shape each earned a staggering 99.7%, and her overall bone structure aligns almost seamlessly with Phi.
She’s long been hailed as a walking sculpture, and De Silva’s mapping only confirms what many fashion houses already knew.
2. Zendaya – 94.37%
Image credits: bulgari.com
Zendaya ranks second with a 94.37% score, led by her forehead and lips, which score 98% and 99.5%, respectively. Her face blends precision with softness, a rare mix that even the Golden Ratio respects.
Zendaya radiates calm, commands attention without effort, and has become a beauty standard of her own. You don’t need facial math to see why.
1. Jodie Comer – 94.52%
Finally, Jodie Comer takes the crown with 94.52%. Her lips and nose hit 98.7%, and her chin, eye position, and overall symmetry checked nearly every Golden Ratio box. Only her brows scored below the curve at 88%.
Jodie Comer isn’t a social media beauty symbol or a red-carpet regular. She’s an actress known for her range, not her ratios. Yet according to De Silva’s formula, her features come closest to mathematical perfection.
Whether that translates to global beauty status is an entirely different equation.
Scientific Beauty vs Cultural Beauty
The Golden Ratio might claim to define facial perfection, but symmetry alone doesn’t guarantee universal appeal. The Cambridge Dictionary defines beauty as simply “the quality of being pleasing and attractive, especially to look at,” and that can vary wildly across time, culture, and personal experience.
If millions of people around the world find someone more beautiful than the mathematically crowned No. 1, doesn’t that matter more than a decimal point? By that logic, collective perception, not geometry, decides who the most beautiful woman in the world really is.
Maybe the old saying still stands: beauty is, and always has been, in the eye of the beholder.
Beauty Standards in Different Parts of the World
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Falling short of the Golden Ratio doesn’t mean falling short of beauty. What qualifies as “ideal” depends on where you look.
In Nigeria, beauty ideals celebrate fuller bodies, broader hips, and visible curves, traits often viewed differently in parts of East Asia or the West.
“The average African woman is robust, has big hips, a lot of bust,” explained nightclub owner Ken Calebs-Olumese (per the New York Times). “That’s what she offers in terms of beauty. It’s in our culture.”
When Agbani Darego won Miss World in 2001 as the first Black African winner, her slim frame represented a shift toward more Western-influenced ideals. But not everyone approved.
In her home country, some older generations saw her appearance as a departure from traditional beauty, while younger women began chasing thinner body types. As Nigerian student Linda Ikeji noted, “After Agbani won, girls look up to me and ask me how to get slim.”
A very different trend emerged in Brazil: a booming plastic surgery industry. It’s now the second-highest in the world for cosmetic procedures, with silicone implants, liposuction, and abdominoplasty among the most popular (per Statista).
These shifting ideals are nothing new. Ancient Greek philosophers spent centuries debating the meaning of beauty, and they didn’t equate it with symmetry alone. To them, physical appearance was closely tied to character. The term kaloskagathos, for example, described someone as “beautiful inside and out,” a person whose outer form reflected inner virtue.
Maybe PEOPLE magazine got it right, after all. In a retrospective on their World’s Most Beautiful franchise, editors concluded:
“There is no such thing as perfect beauty. People have blessedly different ideas about what's beautiful. And most people are beautiful in some way. That's about as beautiful as anybody really needs to be.”