Category: Attractiveness

Facial scars on men are seen as attractive to women but only under certain circumstances — they are signs of bravery and health.

Women find small facial scars attractive when looking for a short-term relationship, research finds.

Previously it was thought facial scars made men look less attractive in this context.

However, it seems women may link facial scars to bravery and health.

For long-term relationships, male facial scarring made no difference to women’s perceptions of attractiveness.

When men looked at pictures of women with small scars and without, it made no difference, whatever type of relationship they were considering.

Dr Rob Burriss, the study’s first author, said:

“Male and female participants were shown images of faces that displayed scarring from injury or illness, and were asked to rate how attractive they found the person for long-term and short-term relationships.

Women may have rated scarring as an attractive quality for short-term relationships because they found it be a symbol of masculinity, a feature that is linked to high testosterone levels and an indicator of good genetic qualities that can be passed on to offspring.

Men without scars, however, could be seen as more caring and therefore more suitable for long-term relationships.

Study tests if facial scars are attractive

The results come from a study of 223 people who were asked to look at pictures of opposite-sex faces.

Some people had small facial scars, while others did not.

The facial scars made men 6 percent more attractive, on average.

Dr Burriss said:

“The results demonstrate that we may have more in common with non-Western cultures than previously thought.

The perception that scarring is a sign of strength is a view shared by the Yanomamö tribe of Venezuela for example, who use face-paint to accentuate scars that result from ritualised club fights designed to test a man’s endurance against repeated strikes to the head.

The assumption that scarring is a sign of bravery is also consistent with the historical tradition of academic fencing in Western culture, whereby scarring on a man was often evidence of his courage and ability to withstand an opponent’s blow.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Burriss et al., 2009).

How to make your face look younger using the facial contrast effect.

When women’s facial features stand out more, they look younger, research finds.

What the researchers call ‘facial contrast’, was linked to an appearance of youth, regardless of ethnic group.

Naturally, people’s facial features merge into each other with age.

Ms Aurélie Porcheron, the study’s first author, said:

“Facial contrast refers to how much the eyes, lips and eyebrows stand out in the face in terms of how light or dark they are or how colorful they are.”

Higher facial contrast has also been previously linked to looking more healthy and more feminine.

How to make your face look younger

This is the first study to test the effect on Caucasian women as well as those from other ethnic groups.

The researchers included Chinese Asian women, Latin American women, South African women and French Caucasian women.

Women were aged between 20 and 80 years old.

The researchers showed digitally manipulated photos to people and asked them to judge who was younger.

The photo with the higher facial contrast was picked as the younger face 80% of the time.

Ms Porcheron said:

“People of different cultures use facial contrast as a cue for perceiving age from the face, even though they are not consciously aware of it.

The results also suggest that people could actively modify how old they look, by altering how much their facial features stand out, for example by darkening or coloring their features.”

Cosmetics make your face look younger

Ms Porcheron is currently the head of research at Chanel, the cosmetics manufacturer.

No need to wonder why Chanel might be interested in this psychological finding.

The study’s authors conclude:

“Because cosmetics were shown to enhance facial contrast, this work provides some support for the notion that a universal function of cosmetics is to make female faces look younger.”

The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology (Porcheron et al., 2017).

How to spot the signs of lust in the eyes.

When a stranger looks into your eyes, it could signal romantic love, but if their eyes then slide down your body, they’re probably feeling sexual desire, a study finds.

This automatic judgement can happen in as little as half a second and likely recruits different networks of activity in the brain.

Stephanie Cacioppo, who led the study, which is published in the journal Psychological Science, said:

“Although little is currently known about the science of love at first sight or how people fall in love, these patterns of response provide the first clues regarding how automatic attentional processes, such as eye gaze, may differentiate feelings of love from feelings of desire toward strangers.”

In the study, men and women looked at photographs of strangers and indicated as quickly as possible whether they were feeling romantic love or sexual desire (Bolmont et al., 2014).

Some were pictures of couples, others of a single person of the opposite sex.

At the same time, eye-tracking equipment followed where they looked in the photographs.

By putting these two pieces of information together, the researchers found that people tended to be looking at the face first, and that’s where the eyes rested when thinking about romantic love.

But, when participants felt sexual desire, their gaze quickly shifted down the body.

Here are the ‘heat maps’ which show where people were looking:

When people felt sexual desire, their gaze mainly focused on the faces at first, but the green area below shows their gaze moving southwards.

Love and sexual desire are surprisingly separate processes in both the brain and in people’s lived experience:

“Love is not a prerequisite for sexual desire, and sexual desire does not necessarily lead to love. Love and lust can exist by themselves or in combination, and to any degree.

In one study of 500 individuals conducted in the mid-1960s by Tennov (1999), 61% of the women and 35% of the men agreed with the statement, “I have been in love without feeling any need for sex,” and 53% of the women and 79% of the men agreed with the statement, “I have been sexually attracted without feeling the slightest trace of love.””

Image credits: Stephanie Cacioppo & Bolmont et al.

Vocal fry is the creaky voice sometimes used by young women — research explores whether it is attractive and how others perceive it.

From Meredith Grey in Grey’s Anatomy, through Britney Spears, the Kardashians and Katy Perry.

They all do it, but how is vocal fry perceived?

In fact, ‘Vocal fry’ — a vocal affectation of young American women — may be hurting people’s job prospects and reducing their attractivity, according to research.

Vocal fry has become popular across the US in the last decade, especially among young women.

It’s often paired with ‘uptalk’, where the voice goes up at the end of the sentence as though the person is asking a question.

What is vocal fry?

Here is a YouTube user giving a perfect demonstration of vocal fry:

Vocal fry is supposedly associated with more educated, upwardly mobile people, but now psychologists have found the perception may not be so positive.

Is vocal fry attractive for men or women?

In a study published in the journal PLOS ONE, 800 people (half men, half women) listened to a young man and a young women saying “thank you for considering me for this opportunity” (Anderson et al., 2014).

Half the time it was spoken in their normal voice and the other half used vocal fry.

When asked who they would hire for a job, 80 percent preferred people speaking in their usual voice, rather than the vocal fry.

Casey A. Klofstad, one of the study’s authors and an associate professor at the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences, said:

“Our results show that the vocal fry fad is a hindrance to young women who are trying to find work.

Lack of experience due to their younger age, a historically poor economic environment, and sex discrimination are all barriers to labor market success for this demographic.

Given this context, our findings suggest that young women would be best advised to avoid using vocal fry when trying to secure employment.”

Those listening to the voices were also asked about the speaker’s attractivity, competence, education and trustworthiness.

Of these, vocal fry had the largest effect on reducing the speaker’s perceived trustworthiness.

Klofstad speculated on why vocal fry may have such a negative effect on people’s perceptions:

“Humans prefer vocal characteristics that are typical of population norms.

While strange sounding voices might be more memorable because they are novel, humans find ‘average’ sounding voices to be more attractive.

It is possible that speakers of vocal fry are generally perceived less favorably because vocal fry is accompanied by a dramatic reduction in voice pitch relative to normal speech.”

So, the answer is that vocal fry is not attractive to people:

“Previous studies show that when women try to lower the pitch of their voice they are perceived as less attractive.

You could view the results we found as an extension of this to an economic context, whereby deliberate lowering of voice pitch in a sex-atypical manner by women through vocal fry results in negative perceptions by potential employers.”

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Rich vs poor faces and by extension social class can be read from facial features, almost unconsciously, research finds.

Just by looking at your face features, people can reliably tell whether you are rich vs poor, a study finds.

And on that basis, they also make other judgements: for example, that rich people are more likely to be hired for a job.

Dr Thora Bjornsdottir, who led the study, said:

“It indicates that something as subtle as the signals in your face about your social class can actually then perpetuate it.

Those first impressions can become a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy.

It’s going to influence your interactions, and the opportunities you have.”

The reason is probably that a look of happiness or satisfaction (or unhappiness and dissatisfaction) becomes etched on your face in the teens or early adulthood.

Find the rich vs poor faces

Here are some of the examples from the study, see if you can guess who is rich and who is poor.

Are the rich-looking faces on the left, marked ‘A’, or on the right, marked ‘B’?

The answer is that the four rich-looking faces are on the left, marked ‘A’.

If you look closely, you will see that the difference is even more pronounced along the bottom row: the ‘B’ faces look much more unhappy than the ‘A’ faces.

Dr Nicholas Rule, study co-author, said:

“Over time, your face comes to permanently reflect and reveal your experiences.

Even when we think we’re not expressing something, relics of those emotions are still there.”

Rich vs poor faces study

The results come from a study in which students were shown photos and asked to judge whether they were rich vs poor.

Interestingly, though, people could only judge someone’s social class if they posed with a neutral face.

The effect vanished if people smiled.

Dr Rule said:

“What we’re seeing is students who are just 18-22 years old have already accumulated enough life experience that it has visibly changed and shaped their face to the point you can tell what their socio-economic standing or social class is.

There are neurons in the brain that specialize in facial recognition.

The face is the first thing you notice when you look at somebody.

We see faces in clouds, we see faces in toast.

We are sort of hardwired to look for face-like stimuli.

And this is something people pick up very quickly.

And they are consistent, which is what makes it statistically significant.”

An unconscious judgement

Dr Bjornsdottir concluded:

“People are not really aware of what cues they are using when they make these judgments.

If you ask them why, they don’t know.

They are not aware of how they are doing this.

People talk about the cycle of poverty, and this is potentially one contributor to that.”

The study was published in the journal Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Bjornsdottir & Rule, 2017).