New article: About facial attractiveness in different countries around the world.
Have you ever wondered what makes some people more attractive than others, or what the criteria for beauty are in different cultures? Professors Karel Kleisner, Petr Tureček, Adil Saribay, Ondřej Pavlovič, Juan David Leongómez, Craig Roberts, Jan Havlíček, Jaroslava Varella Valentova, Silviu Apostol, Robert Mbe Akoko and Marco A.C. Varella researched this topic in their article Distinctiveness and femininity, rather than symmetry and masculinity, affect facial attractiveness across the world (2023). In the article, the authors evaluate facial attractiveness in humans taking into account different components in various populations, while combining the geometric morphometrics of 72 standardized frontal facial landmarks and a Bayesian statistical framework. They investigated preferences in both sexes for three structural components of facial attractiveness that are considered indicators of biological quality: symmetry, sexual dimorphism and distinctiveness (i.e. the opposite of prototypicality, the average appearance of the population).
Based on a large sample of standardized photographs of faces of various individuals (n = 1,550) from 10 populations around the world (Brazil, Cameroon, Czechia, Colombia, India, Namibia, Romania, Turkey, United Kingdom and Vietnam), it was found that the most prototypical faces in each population are rated as more attractive. In addition, they corroborated some previous results indicating a positive effect of facial morphological femininity on men’s evaluation of female facial attractiveness. However, they did not find a weak effect of morphological masculinity on women’s evaluation of male facial attractiveness. On the other hand, contrary to several previous studies suggesting that facial symmetry is one of the main biological constituents of human facial attractiveness, in this study facial symmetry had no effect on the evaluation of facial attractiveness. Together with other recent studies, the results support the importance of facial prototypicality (average appearance of a given population) in the perception of physical attractiveness. Thus, although symmetry and prototypicality are correlated, it is prototypicality that is taken into account when evaluating others’ facial attractiveness.
The authors concluded that the evaluation of human facial attractiveness varies little between populations and can be robustly predicted just by considering distinctiveness and femininity.
The authors call for future research that also samples Oceania or a more diverse set of countries on each continent. The conditions for obtaining the photos for facial stimuli and collecting the attractiveness ratings were not completely standardized between each country due to local infrastructure restrictions; this would also allow for future research with greater standardization. Future studies should attempt to overcome these limitations and expand this cross-cultural, multi-component approach to facial attractiveness. However, the authors have offered a more global and ecologically valid approach to defining the relative importance of biologically-based patterns of facial attractiveness in humans.
The study was led by the Czech and Brazilian researchers, and developed in collaboration with other Brazilian, Czech, English, Turkish, Colombian, Romanian and Cameroonian researchers, and published in an international A1 journal (Evolution and Human Behavior). In addition to other funding agencies, the study was supported by CAPES and CNPq.
If you are interested in reading the full article, go to the following link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513823000879?dgcid=author