HOORAY FOR BOLLYWOOD

Torrid Midnight and Aishwarya Rai

Something strange and wonderful came to light when Second Life bloggers took up the challenge to run their avatar through a facial recognition program that determines which celebrity their faces resemble most.  Because here's the thing:

Almost all of them resemble Bollywood film stars.

AngryBeth Shortbread looks like Celina Jaitley.
Sabrina Doolittle also resembles Ms. Jaitley.
Ordinal Malaprop is compared (among others) to Rani Mukherjee.
Elikapeka Tiramisu, another unidentified Bollywood starlet.
And Torrid Midnight, as depicted above, Aishwarya Rai.
(Only one SL blogger's avatar, Celebrity Trollop, generated personalities outside the Bollywood pantheon.)

These are all avatars which look, on the surface at least, white/European.  And to have five out of six resemble Indian stars is pretty extraordinary, considering the thousands of famous faces in the MyHeritage.com database.  What is it about Second Life avatars that make them so consistently resemble Bollywood celebrities?

My wild (and not politically correct) speculation:  roughly speaking, Indian faces are similar in shape and proportion to European faces, albeit with an "exotic" (to Western eyes) overlay:  stronger cheekbones, darker skin, almond-shaped eyes, and so on.  Since most Second Life avatars are stylized, idealized, and heightened variations of beautiful European-Caucasian faces, they end up looking Indian.  To the facial recognition program of MyHeritage.com, in other words, an Indian face is the avatar of Western beauty.

It's worth pointing out here, of course, that the term "avatar" is taken from the Sanskrit word for "godly incarnation".  And so the circle of incarnation is complete.

Comments

[Katrina Kostolany]

[Quote: "My wild (and not politically correct) speculation: roughly speaking, Indian faces are similar in shape and proportion to European faces, albeit with an "exotic" (to Western eyes) overlay: stronger cheekbones, darker skin, almond-shaped eyes, and so on."]

This is because from an evolutionary standpoint, the people of Northern India are part of the same Caucasoid group as Europeans. Many Central European tribes migrated eastwards and settled in the Indus Valley. They were then followed by further migrations and invasions by Scythians & Greeks (i.e. Alexander the Great). The darker skin is merely an adaptation over time to the hotter climate . So your speculation is not too far-fetched :)

[Torley Linden]

Not a coincidence that another site with face-recognition, capabilities, Riya.com, has an Indian base too.

And seems like this can extend popular to things, e.g. put in a photo of an SL couch and see what other couches it looks like.

[moo Money]

I ran my avatar through the site and it came up with Joan Crawford (66%) and Greta Garbo (66%)

[Siobhan Taylor]

Hi, I didn't see this one first time round, but just gave it a go now and got the following matches (among others)

Marilyn Monroe
Bipasha Basu
Tyra Banks

and zOMG Geri Halliwell (maybe I'll pass on that one) ...

Anyway, that was fun ...

[forseti svarog]

too funny. Had to try it -- came up with harrison ford. No complaints about that one lol

[Edav Nomad]

I just read about this and tried it out. I came up with Jack Nicholson as the top male pick (61%) and Neve Campbell as the top female pick (62%)

[Sabrina Doolittle]

I don't know the technical tems for this, but I'm pretty sure its the ratio of face width across the eye/upper cheer region vs face length. The standard of main stream beauty in SL seems to be skewed towards heart-shaped faces and heads rather than oval shaped heads, which is certainly what very white, very anglo me has in real life. (My annoyingly beautiful half sister, however, has a heart-shaped face and olive skin and is constantly being asked if she's Indian.)

[Jade Fondue]

I tried it with my SL avatar and a character I play on Guild Wars. My SL avatar came out as Meg Ryan and my Guild Wars character was Julie Christie.