There is a classic beauty about the young girl on the cover of this week鈥檚 New 杏吧原创, reminiscent of Vermeer, Rembrandt or even Courbet. The boy on this supplement鈥檚 cover shares her painterly qualities.
Yet look closely, and something is not quite right. They have an eerie, luminous, almost ghost-like quality. They are in fact composites of 16 faces, formed by a digital artist working in the 21st century. As more and more faces were added, this unearthly beauty emerged as the distillation of youth. True beauty, it seems, is the average of everyone.
The work of the artist Chris Dorley-Brown was made possible by advances in understanding the physiology and psychology of the face, coupled with a technological revolution that provides a digital palette for everyone from artists to forensic scientists and surgeons.
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This special supplement features some of the 200 exhibits at the Wellcome Trust鈥檚 exhibition (see panel left), alongside reports which complement the exhibition by exploring what is possible and what is about to be. Secrets of the Face reveals a world where altered faces of every hue, from the enhanced but recognisably human to the frankly digital, are already with us: selling products, in rock videos and forensic medicine, modelling facial surgery or other procedures, as video-conference stand-ins, online avatars and even in movies as resurrected actors.
But what does all this imitation of life mean? What happens when the face is no longer shaped by biology alone, but by humans using new technologies (opposite)? Suppose people were to prefer 鈥� and there are already signs that they do 鈥� unreal faces to real ones? And what if everyone wants to look like Tom Cruise or J-Lo 鈥� even if it鈥檚 bad for them (see 鈥淧erils of perfection鈥�)?
This unique fusion of art, science and technology promises to help us resolve old problems such as the relationship between genes, faces and character (see 鈥淔ace values鈥�) 鈥� and how it is that, as Darwin suspected, facial expressions turn out to be truly universal (see 鈥淗appy, sad, angry, disgusted鈥�).
Even more practically, it offers powerful new ways to help us remember faces so we can catch more criminals (see 鈥淯nusual suspects鈥�). And software that can merge photographs of missing children with their parents is revealing so much about how faces age that children can be tracked down years after they go missing (see 鈥淭he lost children鈥�).
Will we be able to take anything at face value ever again?