The science behind a beautiful face. Why does society think some faces are prettier than others? Click to read personal experiences and thoughts.
Image 1: A beautiful face according to science
We morally shouldn't judge a person by their appearance, however it is inevitable as a human to judge others based on how they look. Two scientists, Wills and Todorov, conducted separate experiments where they investigated the minimal conditions under which people make inferences according to their facial appearance. They concluded that judgments made after a 100-ms exposure were sufficient for participants to form an impression as it is highly correlated with judgments made in the absence of time constraints.
Since we judge a person's appearance when we see someone attractive, it is hard to take a second look. So, what exactly is beauty?
There isn't a simple answer. Scientists have been looking into the more rational side of beauty (e.g how our behaviour changes due to beauty) and what beauty holds within it.
Average Face = Beautiful Face
When presented with a set of faces, we can easily point to the more attractive ones. Researchers pointed out a norm that the faces seen as attractive are often "average". In short, that faces are the mathematical averages of most people's faces.
This idea of average and norm is demonstrated in the form of computer-generated composites in 1990 by scientists Langlois and Roggman. These scientists digitized mathematically averaged samples of male and female faces and had adults judge the attractiveness of both the individual faces and the computer-generated composite images. The composite faces (mathematically averaged faces) were judged as more attractive than almost all the individual faces. This supports the hypothesis that a "normal" face is more attractive than a "unique face".
Why do we prefer "average" faces?
Averageness, e.g symmetry, is something that we find attractive and this is due to how our brain process faces.
A quote by Marcos Nadal, a psychologist at the University of Vienna who studies aesthetic experiences.
"...This aspect of beauty might instead be a by-product of how the brain works. The brain works by extracting regularities."
In addition to this quote from Nadal, Langlois and her team in Texas tackled this question using a technique called EEG.
Image 2: Passive electrodes that the 48 undergraduates wore to study their brain activity
To summarize, scientists Nadal and Langois recorded event-related potential (ERP) measures of stimulus-evoked electroencephalographic (EEG) activity at the scalp while adults categorized images of faces as human or chimpanzee, a task that engaged automatic, stimulus-driven processing related to the attractiveness of the human faces.
These scientists recruited 48 undergraduates for their brain study. Each was presented with colour images of highly attractive, unattractive, digitally morphed images that combined many features into an average face or occasionally chimpanzee faces were put in the mix too while wearing the electrode net. The EEG recorded the brain activity as each student viewed the pictures.
The EEG statistics allow scientists to see the brain's activity and then come to a conclusion.
Finding 1: There is an inverse relationship between the attractiveness and distinctiveness of our face stimuli. Aligning with the hypothesis, participants rated highly attractive and averaged faces as more attractive and less distinctive than the lowly attractive faces.
Finding 2: Participants categorized highly attractive and averaged faces as “human” faster than lowly attractive faces. This implies that looking at attractive faces is a lot easier for the brain and simplifies this complex process for the brain which could be one of the reasons why we prefer looking at pretty faces.
Personal Opinion
I personally think that this topic is fascinating. The perception of beauty is something that is ever-changing and human science has such a special connection to beauty. The fact that we judge someone without our knowledge is both scary yet inevitable. An example would be if I went down to the supermarket to run some errands, I'd be coming across a lot of new faces and without my knowledge, I would have made some assumptions about them. Because we have the tendency to do this, it somewhat makes our perception of individuals bias based on how attractive they are. Since we judge a person in 100-ms, looking presentable, confident and beautiful allows others to make a good first impression which could open a lot of opportunities.
Furthermore, the issue of "pretty privilege" is further emphasized in social media, like Instagram, which shows us a very shallow version of someone as it is just a collage of edited and filtered pictures that a stranger uploaded online. This causes us to judge influencers mostly based on their appearance, as their facial features match society's current beauty standards. Thus, researching deep into the science of beauty and human behaviour showed me a totally different perspective of the beauty market in general.
Anything to share?