George Clooney, Bradley Cooper and Brad Pitt are the world's most handsome men - at least, according to an Ancient Greek formula.

Using the so-called 'Golden Ratio of Beauty Phi' - believed by the ancient civilisation to hold the secret to perfection - computer mapping technology analysed the faces of famous men.

Their eyes, noses, mouths, eyebrows, chins, jaws and facial shapes were measured to see how they compared to the ratio of 1.618.

New father Clooney, aged 56, came closest with a score of 91.86 per cent, closely followed by Bradley Cooper at 91.80 per cent and Brad Pitt with 90.51.

Idris Elba, Will Smith and Harry Styles also scored highly.

According to the analysis, by Harley Street cosmetic surgeon Dr Julian De Silva, the top 10 most handsome men are:

Dr De Silva carried out a similar analysis of female celebrities in 2016, which found that actress Amber Heard was the most beautiful woman in the world.

The Golden Radio (represented by the Greek letter phi, or φ ) is an irrational number, ie one which cannot be written as a simple fraction.

It is essentially used to describe the relationship between two measures of any kind.

For the ratio to be 'golden', the ratio between the two measures must be the same as the ratio between the larger measure and both measures added together.

It is closely related to Fibonacci numbers, and is often depicted by a 'golden spiral' - a rectangle in which a spiral is drawn.

The spiral gets wider by a factor of φ for every quarter turn.

But critics have dismissed it as a measure of perfection, arguing that many things fit the pattern which are unremarkable or not particularly beautiful - while other things have different ratios without losing any aesthetic appeal.

Twitter user @FibonacciSpiral - a self-styled meme parody account - regularly posts images of the golden spiral superimposed onto various pictures to illustrate the point.