Alex at Marginal Revolution posts about the finding that “average” looks are beautiful; in other words averaging pictures of many people together produces a picture more attractive than most of the sources. There are several theories for this; for example, people’s prototype conceptions of things tend to be averages of the actual instantiations, or this is a result of stabilizing selection, or symmetry (produced by averaging out random asymmetries in individuals) is attractive. I don’t know; any or all of those could be true, and I’m not going to say that average isn’t attractive. But the particular picture given in the MR post doesn’t convince me. Go look at it. Why do you think the bottom faces are more attractive than the top ones?

The most striking thing I see is a significant difference in skin tones. The top picture on the female side is of an individual with a pretty patchy complexion. Her forehead is shiny, her nose is red, and the skin around her cheeks and chin is blotchy. She looks like a person of normal attractiveness in a very unflattering picture.

The bottom female picture has perfectly even skin. Very few people have skin like that naturally. It’s definitely something that people tend to find attractive; I know that, particularly in women, clear unblemished skin is one of the most attractive features to me. Probably there’s an evolutionary reason for that; I’ve heard that it signifies health and lack of parasites, which sounds reasonable.

It’s also very strongly reinforced by our culture: you’ll see models and actresses with unusual features, but very rarely do you see one with skin that hasn’t been made up and airbrushed to perfection. And in fact, that’s what the bottom picture looks like: someone of fairly average attractiveness (perhaps slightly more than the person in the top picture) whose photo has been airbrushed to within an inch of its life.

Posted by Amanda in General |