The Metropolis

"The sexuality of angularity" - why are acute angles just so damn sexy?

Mike Pollitt | Tuesday 24 May, 2011 13:07

“Features that protrude are ungainly to Chinese sensibilities…smoothness and alignment are idealised. Things like thrusting cheekbones won’t appeal. [In contrast] the West likes that combination of the sexuality of angularity and the smoothness of skin.”
[Advertising guru Tom Doctoroff on differences between Western and Eastern ideals of beauty in supermodels, quoted in this month’s Vogue.]

Idea for an engaging maths GCSE question, worded thus:

Using principles of Euclidean geometry, evaluate whether the following faces are hot or not:

a.) Cheryl Cole, from a Chinese perspective. (5 marks)
b.) Lucy Liu, from a Western perspective. (5 marks)
c.) Lucy Liu, from a Chinese perspective which takes into account tensions arising from her Taiwanese background. (10 marks)
d.) Zhang Ziyi, from the perspective of someone born in the West to Chinese parents, who then moved back to China for a period in their teens before coming back to London to study. (20 marks)

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