“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
It’s not just a comforting bromide to tell ugly children; it’s an undeniable fact of our reality. Each individual’s experience of the world is purely subjective—informed by personal history and unique brain chemistry—which is what makes it so absurd when the Daily Mail declares Robert Pattinson “the most handsome man in the world.” We cannot share an identical response to any stimulus, which means that we will never achieve an objective measure of a fundamentally experiential quality like handsomeness. Whoever they chose would necessarily have been controversial—except, of course, the correct answer: Jason Momoa.
How does the Daily Mail even come to its conclusions? Did they do a survey of the entire world—sending photographers to every rural market in Zimbabwe and through the favelas of São Paulo? Did they spend their entire decade’s budget on compiling images of the world’s men, or do they not consider the plebeians outside their TV screens and magazine pages to be truly human? Are we not men to them? Clearly we are not, because if they had scoured our planet’s bus stops and the secluded tribes of Papua New Guinea—seen every last one of us—they would have realized that there is no jawline as perfectly sculpted as Jason Momoa’s, no brow that arches with so much intrigue and allure.
In reality, the Daily Mail made their conclusion based on consultation from cosmetic surgeon Dr. Julian De Silva, who has created a system for defining perfect beauty in mathematical terms. The system relies on the irrational number phi (1.618339…), and the ancient Greek concept of the golden ratio—also known as the “divine proportion”—which has been dubiously ascribed various significance. Dr. De Silva’s system measures each feature of a person’s face and how the features relate to one another with that ratio in mind. Last year he used his method to declare Bella Hadid the world’s most beautiful woman. No doubt a lot of effort went into consolidating data on what people find attractive and fitting it to a theory of phi. It’s actually an endeavor that makes a lot of sense for someone in Dr. De Silva’s field, despite the limitations of codifying subjectivity and the factual reality of Jason Momoa.
That said, there are some obvious flaws in how those measurements are made—using only 2D images rather than a 3D scan—and it seems a bit weird that “the most handsome man in the world” would only align with about 92% of Dr. De Silva’s Platonic ideal of a male face. But what is far more troubling—and possibly grounds to revoke his medical license?—is the fact that Dr. De Silva put in all this work and didn’t take into account the existence of two piercing hazel eyes that squint pure joy directly at your soul each time Jason Momoa smiles.
To be fair, the star of The Lighthouse, and the Twilight series is technically a decent looking human male—as are Henry Cavill, Bradley Cooper, and the other men who ranked highly according to Dr. De Silva’s system. Pattinson has some solid bone structure and a wild mane of hair that always looks a little dirty, but in kind of a fun way. If we’re going to be as generous as possible, it would be appropriate to say that he’s sort of a pasty, British, low-T Jason Momoa. But could he pick me up and hold me in his arms like an actual superhero—a Polynesian demi-god—and carry me away from all the world’s pain while I hold tight to his beard and run one finger along the bold scar above his eye? No. He’s not a sculpted 6’4″ tower of benevolent muscle. He’s a measly 6’1″—basically a 9th grade basketball player, and just as moody.
To put it simply, beauty is entirely subjective and impossible to quantify, and also the Daily Mail and Dr. De Silva are spreading blatant lies and committing Jason Momoa erasure. Canceled.
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