Since beauty qua beauty is a foreign concept to most guys, we’ve been wracking our brains here trying to come up with informative articles for Beauty Week. And while I might be expected to compile a list of the Five Hottest Anime Girls, given that beauty is more than sex appeal, and the flesh more than raiment (Matthew 6:25)–and since girls often seem to have strong opinions about the beauty of other girls–I thought I would try something a bit different. (Who am I kidding, I’ll probably do the Hottest Girls thing later)

5. Koizumi Itsuki (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya)

See above. If there’s one thing anime has taught me, it’s that girls like a guy with eerie fixed facial expressions. Surely one of the funniest moments in the series is when Koizumi is putting on Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and the entire audience is made up of first-year girls mooning over how hot he is.

4. Jin (Samurai Champloo)

Everyone loves glasses, right? The one time in my life I cosplayed, it was as Jin; I lost the contest to a Haruka Haruhara with an actual Rickenbacker bass.

3. Seifer Almasy (Final Fantasy VIII)

While the peerless Final Fantasy series of games have given us plenty of good-looking guys, Seifer, with his strong Celtic profile, is the only one I’d care to look like myself. While I hate to reinforce stereotypes, if a guy spends as much time on his hair as Cloud does, or wears as much leather as Squall, he’s probably not that into you ifyaknowwhatImean.

2. Kaji (Evangelion)

Can you see my profile picture? Can you, um, see the ponytail sticking around the back of my head? Ye-eah…I hadn’t thought about this in years, but I was indeed trying to cop Kaji’s look, which seared itself into my brain at a young age as a standard of male beauty.

1. Ken Ichijouji (Digimon)

If, a la Koji Suzuki’s Spiral, all men were infected with a virus that made them identical, I would have to vote that we look like this. Of course when Ken transforms into The Emperor, his hair becomes a disaster, which just goes to prove that power corrupts.