INTRODUCTION


"What is beauty?". Is beauty only in the eye of the beholder, or are there some absolute values? Beauty is a mystery! "I know not what beauty is, but I know that it touches many things", Dürer .
If we study the beauty of nature, teeth, or art we will discover a common principle running throughout. This common principle is the universal recognition of pleasant proportion. We all have a natural understanding of good proportion much in the same way as we know how to divide a line in half or erect a perpendicular. We easily agree that an object of art has good or bad proportion, or that this face looks too long, or too short and out of proportion. This magical connecting thread of proportion, known since antiquity, is non other than the Golden Proportion, a phenomenon related to beauty.
The following notes illustrate just a few facets of the mystery and magic of this proportion. The understanding of this concept will enable the reader to take a first step on a journey of discovery into an unexpected dimension of beauty which affects our lives at every turn. It is one of the building blocks of beauty that we can easily apply to our dental work, confident of success.

 

THE CONCEPT

Whilst the concept of the Golden Proportion is easy to understand, attempts at the application have proved complex and difficult to explain. Its very simplicity has been perplexing. This enchanting proportion has thus not been appreciated at large.

Proportion usually implies a relationship between a larger and a smaller. To clarify the Golden Proportion concept, the adjacent figure shows a number of pairs of lines of different lengths and their ratio to each other. The last line shows the ratio of 1 to 0.618, which is the simplest form of the universally acclaimed Golden Proportion.

         
THE GOLDEN MEAN GAUGE
 
To examine the validity of the fascinating Golden Proportion quickly and easily, an instrument, the GOLDEN MEAN GAUGE was developed to demonstrate this proportion.
      
   

 

 

   

The gauge as seen in the picture to the right, shows that the numerous major landmarks on the moth's wing are in the Golden Proportion.

   
     
 

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A GOLDEN MEAN GAUGE
 

Eddy Levin
23 Church Vale, London, N2 9 PB
Tel: +44 208 883 1370
Fax: +44 208 292 2662
eddylevin@goldenmeangauge.co.uk