Subjectivity and complexity of facial attractiveness
This research addresses the longstanding puzzle of facial beauty for psychologists and cognitive scientists, providing insights into its subjective and complex nature, though it is incremental in its experimental approach.
The study tackled the problem of understanding facial attractiveness by allowing subjects to sculpt their preferred facial variations, revealing that preferences vary significantly among individuals, indicating subjectivity, and uncovering strong correlations in facial distances that highlight universal cognitive processes.
The origin and meaning of facial beauty represent a longstanding puzzle. Despite the profuse literature devoted to facial attractiveness, its very nature, its determinants and the nature of inter-person differences remain controversial issues. Here we tackle such questions proposing a novel experimental approach in which human subjects, instead of rating natural faces, are allowed to efficiently explore the face-space and 'sculpt' their favorite variation of a reference facial image. The results reveal that different subjects prefer distinguishable regions of the face-space, highlighting the essential subjectivity of the phenomenon.The different sculpted facial vectors exhibit strong correlations among pairs of facial distances, characterising the underlying universality and complexity of the cognitive processes, and the relative relevance and robustness of the different facial distances.