Beauty is a trap you walk into willingly. You know you’re being played—by bone structure, by light, by the chemical theatre of your own brain—but you don’t care. You lean in. We all do. It’s the oldest con in the book and the only one we want to keep running.
Cross-cultural psychology has been here before. Studies from Judith Langlois and others have shown that composite faces—averages made by blending many photographs—are rated as more attractive than most individual faces. Think about it: merge twenty different faces from a single region and the jawlines even out, asymmetries cancel, skin textures smooth into a single, coherent surface. Do the same with a hundred and you get something eerily familiar, as if you’ve met this person before. The statistical mean turns out to be strangely recognisable, even comforting. The same happens with voices—average out multiple speakers and you end up with something smooth, easy to listen to, even if it never existed in reality.
Mathematically, you can think of this as the centroid in a high-dimensional distribution. It’s not a point of sameness, it’s a point of maximal connection—where the most lines between possibilities can be drawn. In physics, it behaves like a potential well: features, styles, and variations tend to roll into it. You can picture this by imagining marbles on a stretched sheet—release them anywhere and they spiral toward the lowest point. Psychologically, our brains are tuned to this. The closer to the average, the less cognitive work needed to process and categorise a face. That efficiency—perceptual least action—feels like fluency, and fluency feels like beauty.
Culture wraps itself around these attractors, embedding its logic into them. Old centres become the scaffolding for new forms—classical Greek sculpture influencing Renaissance portraiture, or the golden ratio quietly reappearing in modern design. Media is just one subset of this wider logic, shaping the pathways through which these attractors propagate. In the age of machine learning, algorithms trained on billions of images learn the geometry of this gravitational centre, then reproduce and amplify it, feeding us ideals built from the very averages they helped define.
But the geometry doesn’t care. Follow the contour of a cheekbone and you’re tracing a smooth path through high-dimensional space. The mind doesn’t just see it—it rides it, compelled by the interpolation between possibilities. Each curve is a seam where entropy is not the enemy of structure but its source. In this topology, the human face is an instance, the attractor is the constant, and the constant is free-floating above and beyond the people it manifests through.
That’s the irony: we think beauty lives in individuals, but the real action is in the field. The attractor doesn’t stop at the skin; it extends into the combinatorial space of everything that could be. Infinity is already there, because there’s no final form—only the curve’s infinite capacity to absorb, recombine, and return as something that feels familiar enough to love. The mind wants to know how it works. The wanting is what it is. And the wanting, in the end, is the whole orbit.
Daedelus Kite 