12 Key Factors That Determine Your Attractiveness - Macken Murphy

Just be attractive, bro is like the biggest meme-

Yes.

... in online dating-

Yeah.

... at the moment. What actually makes an attractive face?

Well, there's a couple things that come up again and again in the literature, and then there's also a couple things that I think men think are very attractive and are surprised when they find out that women don't actually necessarily care about it. Now that- that's not to say, we'll, we'll get into the weeds, but that's, that's not to say that men are necessarily wrong to want to look like that, right? It's just that it's not the attractiveness component. So a couple things that come up a lot are averageness, right? And that's mathematical averageness. So having a nose that is of average size, shape, and placement. So some people think average and they're like, oh, normal. And it's like a person with a very average looking face, meaning a face that would be the result of a composite of many faces superimposed on each other, a person with that sort of face would look like a model, right? They, they, you- if you superimpose a set of faces, the face that results from it will be more attractive than any individual in that set, right? And they, they, we can talk if you want, uh, I know that you're interested in this sort of thing as to the possible evolutionary and also just social reasons why that might be the case. Uh, a quick two theories would be maybe average faces are easier to process, right? And the processing speed is pleasant. It's like, oh, there's nothing glaring here. And it's like, oh, I- I quite like looking at this. From an evolutionary perspective, it could be that the average four traits are the end result of sexual selection, right? So we're putting the cart before the hor- horse in the sense that the reason that the average nose is the average nose is because there's been so much historical selection on that shape, size, and placement.

On non-average noses, against non-average noses.

Against, against non-average noses. So the reason that it's the average is because noses that are too big get cut out. So it's really the- there- there's some re- other reason why that size, shape, and placement is attractive. And it's become the average over... 'cause w- we are the end result of previous selection. So averageness comes up a lot. Another thing that comes up a lot is symmetry, right? Uh, symmetry is definitely attractive, right? A- a- and- and it's attractive on its own. It also seems to correlate with other m- matrices of attractiveness. But symmetry comes out again and again and again. If the left side of your face looks a lot like the right side of your face, then you're likely more attractive than you would be if you didn't have that. And, and with both of these things, with averageness, with symmetry, there, there are plenty of individual cases where people have very non-average traits and are still stunning, right? Uh, plenty of people are highly asymmetrical. I, I mean, some of our, our considered most, most gorgeous celebrities have, you know, very asymmetrical faces. But these traits do matter. Uh, symmetry, the standard evo explanation is that this is a signal of, let's say, robust underlying developmental qualities, right? The, the, that they were able to withstand the insults of their environment, right? At the very least, you know that they don't have some horrible injury to one side of their face or something like that. They didn't have some horrible illness. And they don't have, uh, certain heritable genetic disorders, right? And this is something that we'll likely talk about more. Why, why do we care about beauty at all? And it's partially because beauty seems to be a signal of underlying qualities that matter more, such as health, right? So I'll note that the symmetry studies have mixed results in Western populations, right? So it's like we know that symmetry is attractive, but there's a question of like does it actually correlate with healthiness? And, and that's not always the case. But it, it is the case, at the very least, that, look, if you've had a... Like, I've got a broken nose from boxing, right? That, that certainly made me less attractive than I would be if I had had a straight one. What does that tell potential mates? It tells them that something, you know, for some reason I couldn't handle it, right? Some- something went wrong for me at some point, right?