This week, we look at the opposite of Ep.12 which suggests that averageing faces results in more attractive looking composites. Much of the benefits of averaged faces are that they have unusually higher rates of symmetry and perfectly clear skin (as a byproduct of the compositing process). However, as other researchers have found, averageness in your facial appeal only gets you so far, and to be truly unique and striking, your face needs features that deviate away from the average and into the extremes of dimorphism and proportion.

When it comes to assessing facial attractiveness, 'Facial Attractiveness: Evolutionary Based Research ' by AC Little has proposed three tenants: Symmetry, Dimorphism and Averageness; it is the last point that is seldom discussed and even less understood.

Being unattractive is a disadvantage in many social interactions if you do the wrong thing or act out of line. These unusual behaviours are called 'norm violations' and as it turns out, there is a double devil-effect at play when physically unattractive people behave in an unattractive way.

You may have heard of the phrase that attraction cannot be negotiated and in this episode it couldn't be truer. As we explore through the research of White Et al, unattractive participants in the dating market pay a heft 'unattractive tax' where undesirable characteristics (dealbreakers vs dealmakers) are disproportionately weighted against less attractive daters.

Tattoos have gone from a social taboo to the upper echelons of high fashion with Jean Paul Gaultier experimenting with tattoo designs in much of his work in the early 90s. In this episode we discuss the social perception of tattoos and the following research suggesting that tattoos have a sensitive cost-benefit ratio of providing some masculine edginess (for both men and women) which correlates to increased desirability but comes at a hit in terms of long term mate characteristics such as stability, reliability and trustworthiness.

In this episode we go over a relatively new concept called 'the fear of being single' (FOBS) which suggests that individuals with higher amounts of this trait, i.e. afraid of being single, anxiety, loneliness, are less selective with their partner choices and willing to go on many more dates to find a partner, regardless of who it is. This specific paper looks at if this FOBS trait is linked to physical attractiveness such that less attractive individuals have higher FOBS and thus are much less selective in dating. As it turns out, the results are not as intuitive as you may have guessed!

In this episode, we start at the Tokyo Olympics and end at a deep dive into why fringe internet communities such as 'incels' and 'femcels' are dissatisfied with their looks and dating by considering Leonhard Et al's paper on dating preferences based on one's own looks. This falls into the category of Festinger's dissonance theory, where couples in such one member is significantly dating down in physical attractiveness undergoes cognitive dissonance in an attempt to justify their reasoning for the large gap in physical attractiveness. As we go through the research in this episode, the results are actually quite surprising and not something you would guess intuitively.

In this episode we cover the negative sterotyping of unattractive individuals. You may have heard of the 'halo effect' where attractive individuals have positive attributes and traits granted to them simply by virtue of being physically attractive. As it turns out from Klebl Et al's paper, there is evidence to suggest a similar but opposite effect happens to the unattractive parties.

In this episode we look at a paper by Groyecka Et al 2017 on how attractiveness is somewhat determined by non-physical cues of voice and smell among other factors such as personality, status and wealth. One of the key findings is just how important smell is, from being able to differentiate between men and women to being able to smell actual personality dominance from different scents. It's not surprise then that many masculine perfumes try to mimic this smell of dominance while feminine ones try to emulate pheromones of subservience and the reasoning behind it is a lot more nuanced than you may think!

In this episode we dissect Cunningham et al's 1990 paper on female facial preferences in men and why more 'babyish' (neotenous) features are actually preferred over hyper-masculine ones. This podcast takes a deep dive into facial aesthetics research, providing additional context, commentary and findings while simplifying the research into a more generalized application of beauty research for a contemporary audience.