Slimmer, happier, but not too happy

In Wikipedia's withering takedown of What the Bleep Do We Know? -- which I featured here -- you can find the following:

Emoto appears to have arbitrarily decided what constitutes a "brilliant crystal" and an "incomplete crystal."

In this context, "brilliant" was meant to be synonymous with "beautiful." The word "arbitrarily" was the only one in the entire review that bothered me, because I have always suspected that beauty was somehow quantifiable.

To wit, from Marginal Revolution:

Three Israeli computer scientists from Tel Aviv University (TAU) have developed the ultimate enhancement tool for retouching digital images. Called the Beauty Function, their program scans an image of your face, studies it and produces a slightly more beautiful you.

Alex Tabarrok's comment:

Photoshop artists, make up artists and cosmetic surgeons have been doing this for years, of course, but it's quite interesting that a computer can identify beauty in a photograph and make the requisite changes.

The results are subtle and fascinating. Check some of them out here. Without exception, I find each after picture more beautiful than the before picture. And in each case, as the title of this post suggests, the subjects seem leaner and happier, but not obnoxiously happy. The lighting seems somewhat better in some cases, and in one case the woman's make-up seems a bit less pronounced, and her expression is more symmetrical.


(This dispatch wouldn't be complete if I failed to come clean: with so little in the way of source material, they would have to run my after picture back through the software all over again, for a next-generation after picture. Possibly multiple times. Possibly until everything everyone ever said was "Malkovich" or whatever.)