The problem with 34 x 25 x 36 is its lack of a fourth number. Bust, waist, hips, IQ?

Let's face it, the cute can't do calculus. They turn heads, yes, but not the gears within them. At the intersection of the pulchritudinous and the perspicacious - what we have is a pitifully null set. So this begs the question - why are models dumb? Furthermore, why do the brainy prefer radio?

Ugly children get less positive feedback than their photogenic brethren. Understandable perhaps, although less so if it's from their own parents. The unfortunate little squirt quickly learns the currency of comeliness and becomes ruefully aware of his apparent poverty. This awareness engenders a deficit in confidence, an oft-stated and crucial ingredient of attractiveness. Something as simple as height generates the requisite quality of feedback to foster CEO-level confidence. There are other factors at play here of course, height, and beauty for that matter, could be less a result of an esteem building environment as it is of wealth. Superior healthcare and nutrition set the conditions for a maximizing of one's physical potential. But this explanation falls somewhat short, just look at the preponderance of Eastern European models.

Americans like winners. The beautiful are born with genes of gold. All that kicking in utero? Warming up for the victory lap. Thankfully, our meritocracy allows for backroads to high self-esteem. One may compensate for a repellent physique with an amusing sense of humor, or by owning large amounts of real estate. But the currency that comes closest to besting beauty? Brains.

And so, said squirt hits the books.

Ugly folks become smart in order to tap the limited resource of others' attention that lovely people receive by default. This may leave hotties cognitively complacent. Before they know it the first and last thing they read is a modeling contract.

Of course, the automatic attention toward the attractive is often bestowed via envy, a sin as deadly as it is profitable. The envious are legion, and they subscribe to US Weekly. What they seek is vicarious escape from mediocrity, the schadenfreude-laden thrill of spotting a fatal chink in the armor of the alluring elite. But as we all know "there is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." Those of us of middling appearance are incentivized to smarten up.

This isn't to say brains and banality are necessarily correlated. A causal relationship may hold true in that a significant majority of intelligent people happen to be plain, and I argue that intelligence is, in part, a result of plainness. This precludes its reverse - most plain-looking people are intelligent. Anyone who's ever been to a post office can attest to that. The same holds true on the other end - a significant majority of beautiful people are of average or below-average intelligence (for an inevitable list of outliers, see comments), but it doesn't follow that all dumb people are beautiful.

But perhaps we're using the wrong metric. Is being a fashion model still a reliable measure of attractiveness in the classic sense? As the market for beauty diversifies, haute couture has become more art than commerce. The vulgar do Playboy and extra-terrestrials do Vogue. So where are the honeys that we speak of? Hollywood, no dice. Across the Atlantic, getting warmer.

Whatever the means of doing so, we believe intelligence to be something we can objectively measure - these days, the IQ test is the dominant method (although I, among others, am doubtful of its predictiveness). It turns out beauty is also quantifiable using criteria such as facial shape and symmetry, ratios of distances between facial features, and of course, height, weight and body mass index.

I'm of average height, I'm fit, I cycle, but my face is thoroughly asymmetrical. Let's just say when I meet dentists, they reach for their business cards. I had a consultation for orthognathic surgery but the $6,000 co-pay and the year-long commitment put me off. My misaligned jaw had always been a bane, second only to my eyes. Early on, emasculated stereotypes of the Asian American male helped carve out my low-rung social status. I sought a way up with the aggressive vindication of a guy who's 5' 3" in the NBA. I gained the confidence I needed by way of what my brain contained, not the number of golden ratios extant on my form. Two years ago, after a sufficiently jilted adolescence and beyond, I got married...to a model. Her measurements: 34 x 25 x 36 x 140.