The most attractive lip size and shape might surprise you. A 50 percent boost is the best, but pay attention to the ratio of upper to lower lip.
Many women are paying for cosmetic ‘enhancements’ to their lips that are making them less attractive, if new research is anything to go by.
The overfilled upper lip may not actually be the most attractive look, a study published in the journal JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery finds.
Scientists at the University of California showed a series of pictures of women’s faces to 150 judges.
Most attractive lip shape and size
Both the overall size of the lips and the ratio of top lip to bottom lip was digitally manipulated to see what was most attractive.
First they wanted to look at the general size of the lips, to see how much bigger was actually attractive (see below).
It turned out that increasing lip size by around 50 percent was the most attractive.
(Of course, this 50 percent figure will depend on how big your lips are to begin with.)
This one is marked ‘C’ in the image above.
Are heavy lower lips attractive?
Next they looked at the ratio of top lip to bottom lip (see below).
Bear in mind that many celebrities choose something that looks like the image on the right, marked ‘D’, with a heavy upper lip.
It turned out that the picture on the far-left marked ‘A’ was actually seen as most attractive.
Unsurprisingly to anyone with functioning eye balls, ‘D’, with a heavy upper lip, was the least attractive look.
In fact, it was the heavier lower lip that was rated most attractive.
Anyone thinking of augmenting their lips would do well to heed the advice of this study’s authors:
“We advocate preservation of the natural ratio or achieving a 1:2 ratio in lip augmentation procedures while avoiding the overfilled upper lip look frequently seen among celebrities.”
We shall have to wait with baited breath for the complementary study on the perfect ratio for a man’s lips…
The study was published in the journal JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery (Popenko et al., 2017).
