You already know the sad truth about the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. Now, it is time to debunk another beloved figure from your childhood: the Golden Ratio. The so-called perfect proportion conceived by Euclid is believed to have inspired generations of artists and architects, including Leonardo da Vinci, Salvador Dali and Le Corbusier. But a new report in Fast Company calls the Golden Ratio “bullshit”. “There’s no science to back it up. Those who believe the Golden Ratio is the hidden math behind beauty are falling for a 150-year-old scam,” according to the magazine. Studies show that people do not prefer shapes that incorporate the golden ratio over those that are slightly more or less proportional. The German psychologist Adolf Zeising, who popularised the ratio in the 19th century, had a tendency to apply it arbitrarily to nature and the human body. “When measuring anything as complex as the human body, it’s easy to come up with examples of ratios that are very near to 1.6,” says Keith Devlin, a professor of mathematics at Stanford University and a card-carrying aesthetic sceptic. Next time someone tells you that the secret to the enduring success of Stonehenge or the Chartres Cathedral is the Golden Ratio, feel free to set him straight.
