Almost eight thousand British people entered a contest to win the title of “Britain’s Most Beautiful Face” in a competition sponsored by Lorraine Cosmetics. After being selected as one of the three finalists, blond-haired and blue-eyed student Florence Colgate won the contest when she beat out the other finalists in a public vote. I call foul. A public vote to determine the most beautiful face, in Britain? Isn’t this the nation with dental hygiene–and you know the mouth is part of the face, don’t you?–so bad it’s become a running joke?

All jokes aside, Florence Colgate is definitely a beautiful woman. Florence’s beauty is not under dispute. It’s the standards that were used to select Ms. Colgate that are a little fishy. According to the judges who selected Colgate as one of the three finalists, they did so because she had a perfectly proportioned face with an “’optimum ratio’ between her eyes, mouth, forehead and chin.” That’s just a fancy way of saying that the distance from the eye’s to the mouth should be one third of the face; Florence’s distance measured 32.8 percent.

A couple thousand years ago the ancient Greeks decided that a one-third-of-the-way distance between the eyes and the nose was the best measurement of beauty, and thus, that’s the standard that the judges in the contest used to select their finalist. What a pity: It’s been 2,000 years and the Brits haven’t thought up a way of measuring beauty that is any more culturally-relevant than what Greeks had in the ancient world.

All of this is to say that when it comes to who gets to be the most anything, just look at the standards that are being used if you want to figure out who’s most likely to win.