Study reveals simple is the real science of sexy

THE science of what men find attractive reveals that simple is the new sexy, a French study has found.

Makeup Image, supplied free of charge by Sarah Archbold at Torstar.

MOVE over sharp-featured supermodels. When it comes to attractiveness, bland might just be beautiful, and simple the new sexy.

French scientists who studied the male reaction to two sets of pictures of women’s faces and asked them to rate their attractiveness have found beauty is plain.

The research, published by the Royal Society of Open Science who used the men’s ratings of the ‘attractiveness’ of the images of and a computer model of the brain’s visual cortex to figure out what makes a woman ‘beautiful’, discovered a ‘simpler’ face, with less going on, was more attractive.

“This is a very interesting effect,” says University of Queensland School of psychology Professor Bill von Hippel.

“The interesting point this paper is making is that faces that are easy to process are perceived as more attractive.

“That raises the possibility that symmetrical faces, faces without unusual features, are perceived as attractive partially because they’re processed more easily.

“If so, then this effect should be largely independent of gender — women should show the same preference for easily processed faces that men do.”

Prof von Hippel says that’s not just because we are simple creatures — it’s more that our brains are so efficient — as the paper’s name ‘Beauty is in the efficient coding of the beholder’ suggests.

But the findings do reinforce the notion that when it comes to attractiveness, first impressions count. In fact, you may have subconsciously decided someone is attractive before you consciously know it.

“There is a large literature on what is known as ‘perceptual fluency’. Perceptual fluency refers to how easy something is to process — how easily a person can figure out what they’re looking at,” Prof von Hippel says.

“We tend to like things that are perceived more fluently.

So hot right now: Emoticons work because of their simple familiarity — they are as sparse as it gets.

“This is part of the reason why ubiquitous brands are highly preferred; we see the Nike swoosh or the word Coke and it’s processed easily by virtue of its familiarity and that makes it more positive.

“Think about an emoticon,” says Prof van Hippel. “You have two dots and a curved line that immediately everyone processes as a smile. It’s sparse, it’s plain. It’s familiar, and it’s easy to understand.

“The part of the brain processing these things means it is very much an involuntary, automatic, probably largely unconscious reaction. So yes, first impressions are terribly important.”

So if plain is the new attractive, is it time to put down the contouring brush and ditch the bright red lipstick?

“My guess is lips and cheeks and eyes shaped in a prototypically attractive fashion are very easily processed themselves,” says Prof von Hippel

“So if contouring or lipstick makes it a more prototypical face, I’d imagine that meets the definition of ‘simple’.”

The ‘face value’ research might even explain the popularity of a dating apps like Tinder, in which decisions are made with a swipe left or right, based on a picture.

Originally published as Study reveals simple is the real science of sexy