QOVES Deep Dive | A Scientific Look At Your Looks

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 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.

Quite often, we see far too many people who become hyper fixated on one particular facial feature that leads to their insecurities. For many, it is often the lips or the nose which leads to a downhill spiral of elective cosmetic surgeries as an avenue of a fix rather than seeking psychological help to treat the underlying body dysphoria. In this episode, we discuss the potential pitfalls of too much elective surgery and why this is often a result of a lack of understanding of facial harmony, and how features are actually evaluated by a human rater in principle application.