No women are lawful to you beyond this, nor that you change them for other wives, even though you may be attracted by their beauty, except those to whom you are committed by oaths. God is watchful over all things.
Translation endnotes
[33:52] Those who traded the progressive precepts of the Quran with the misogynistic culture of the medieval Pagan, Jewish and Christian communities covered women from head to toe while stripping them of their identities. Why do these people not reflect on this verse and acknowledge it? The verse refers to physical attraction. What is it? Is it subjective or is there a universal or measurable factor in our perception of beauty? Beauty, specifically facial attractiveness, has been a subject attracting the curiosity of philosophers and scientists. The issue received a scientific explanation with the computerized studies in the 1990s. In one of those studies, the scientists took the pictures of 96 college students and made their computer-generated composites by mathematically averaging their pixels in key points. They later asked 300 judges to rate them on a 5-point scale, 1 being very unattractive and 5 being very attractive. The composite faces consisting of higher component faces received the highest scores. In other words, our brain considers the average face of the population in which we live as the most attractive. There are interesting genetic, social and cognitive implications of this study. See 12:31; 30:21.