Attractiveness

Psychologists have examined what faces people attractive. Researchers at the University of St Andrews in Scotland have looked at facial features that determine people’s attractiveness; Perrett, in the journal Nature in 1994. Using digital mixtures of multiple features of human faces with computer generated morphing techniques they found that while averaged faces were attractive to some extent the most attractive faces were those that were slightly different in facial composite and features than the average. The message here is that to be very attractive in psychological terms, a human face needs to be slightly different from the average, but not too different from the average!

Little & Hancock in 2002 investigated masculinity and attractiveness in men's facial features.

Composite faces, that is faces showing a mixture of characteristics were found to be more attractive than individual faces. Averaging features resulted in increased ratings of attractiveness but decreased ratings of masculinity and distinctiveness. This supported the idea that attractiveness is related to averageness with a preference for female characteristics in male faces. The results suggested that masculinity and distinctiveness are separate components in face recognition.