The faces of women are largely considered more attractive than men
Aleksandarnakic / Getty images
Female faces are considered more attractive than men, a major study involving 12,000 people worldwide. Surprisingly, women are even more likely than men to assess the faces of other women as more attractive.
“When we look at the sex of the assessor, we see that preference for female faces is much stronger for female assessors,” said Eugen Wassiliwizky At the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Germany.
In most mammals and birds, it is men who evolve from the characteristics that make them attractive to the opposite sex, says Wassiliwizky. For example, male mandrill baboons have lively red and blue faces.
“Women are generally rare sex,” he says. “It is the mechanism that made men more flamboyant.”
But as Charles Darwin's biologists have noted, humans seem unusual with regard to women as “the fairer sex”.
“There has been a very long discussion since the 19th century on the reasons why these sexual roles have been reversed for humans, but it has never been put to an empirical test,” said Wassiliwizky.
He realized that he could check if this hypothesis was correct using the raw data of facial attractiveness studies carried out for other purposes. For example, one of the studies whose teams have used data examining if emotions affect facial attractiveness.
Most of the data analyzed come from studies that have specifically recruited heterosexual volunteers to assess photos of faces, says Wassiliwizky. The analysis includes the notes of some volunteers who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, but the figures are too small from which to draw statistically significant conclusions.
The preference for female faces seems to cross national and cultural borders, the team finding a “moderate to large” effect in all regions of the world, with the exception of sub -Saharan Africa, and in all ethnic groups except those who have identified as African.
The reason why female faces are evaluated as more attractive could be to do with physical differences between the sexes, says Wassiliwizky, but it is also possible that the simple fact of knowing that a person or a man changes how people evaluate their attractiveness.
By comparing the notes of people with the way in which the characteristics of the faces are feminine or male, the team concluded that two thirds of the preference for female faces are due to physical differences, with a third to know sex.
But why do women assess other women as more attractive? “Women could be united or more appreciate the beauty of others,” speculates Wassiliwizky.
As for the reasons why women assess men even lower than men assess other men, women may be embarrassed to admit attraction, he suggests. “They know that the data they hit on the computer are examined, so maybe they don't feel comfortable with it.”
Or maybe women try to determine what the personalities of the men of their faces look like, which affects their notes. Wassiliwizky says that future studies should be more specific and ask: “How much do you feel physically attracted to this person?” Instead of, “What is the attractive this face?”
“The paper is very deepened to demonstrate a gender difference in attractiveness, covering many sets of images and cultures,” explains Anthony Little At the University of Bath, United Kingdom. “However, researchers have long noted that attractiveness is not only to choose a companion.”
“The metanalytic study confirms robust the existence of” the gap of attractiveness of the sexes “”, says Karel Kleisner at Charles University in the Czech Republic.
The Kleisner team discovered that The extent to which the faces of women and men physically differWith certain populations in Africa with the least sexual dimorphism in faces. This could help explain the absence of a significant effect there, he said.
Local beauty standards can also differ considerably from global standards, known as Kleisner. “A major limitation of the study is its lack of sensitivity to the specific aesthetics of African beauty.”
These are also possible studies based on the whole body to different conclusions. “We don't know, to be honest,” said Wassiliwizky. No comparable study was done by examining the attractiveness of the whole body, he said.
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