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.