When it comes to dating, I’ve never had a personality ‘type’.
I’ve dated men as artsy and grungy as Queen West can breed to the most ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ type the financial district has to offer.
They do, however – with the odd exception – have one thing in common: most of them look like they could be brothers. And now, I understand why.
A new study confirms that what we find to be attractive is most likely incredibly specific to our life experiences. So, as it turns out, beauty really is in the eye of the beholder (not that that’s a shocker). The study found that 50 per cent of people’s preference is unique to them.
With that said, there are obviously some people we can all agree are attractive in general – whether they do it for us individually or not. Research has shown that good-looking faces have one thing in common: they’re symmetrical.
But that’s only part of it.
“If you were to rate faces [for attractiveness] and I were to rate the same faces, we would agree about 50% of the time,” says study author Jeremy Wilmer, an assistant professor of psychology at Wellesley College. His new research was published yesterday in the journal Current Biology.
As part of the study, 35,000 people were asked to rate faces for attractiveness on the website Testmybrain.org in an effort to account for the other 50 per cent. The researchers then studied the facial preferences of 547 sets of identical twins and 214 pairs of fraternal twins with the MO to determine whether people who are genetically the same or similar and who grew up in the same environment would have similar views when it comes to attractiveness.
In other words, they wanted to examine whether our perceptions of beauty and attractiveness are the product of nature or nurture.
If it comes down to genetics, then identical twins, in theory, would be more similar to one another than fraternal twins. If family environment and circumstance is most influential, then the fraternal twins would be similar to one another when it comes to perceptions of beauty.
As it turns out, even identical twins with the same upbringing have incredibly different preferences when it comes to facial aesthetics (so don’t expect them to date another pair of twins).
So it’s likely personal and unique experiences that determine who we find attractive. What exactly these experiences of influence are weren’t studied in the paper, however, the researchers do have some theories.
“[Prior research] has found things like, if you take a face and you pair it with positive information, that face then looks more attractive, and faces that are similar to it also look more attractive and vice versa,” says study author Laura Germine of Massachusetts General Hospital. “So you can imagine as you go through life and you form relationships and have friends and people you have a more positive relationship with, you may come to find their face characteristics more attractive, and then other people who look similar to them are then more attractive to you.”
She also adds that exposure to certain faces makes them seem more attractive. The kinds of faces you’re exposed to in your workplace, friendships, and personal relationships can influence the faces you find attractive. So, a very different looking face than you’re used to tends to be seen as less attractive.
This, of course, means that who you find attractive is highly subjective and unique to that individual, no matter their genetic makeup or upbringing.
In the end, beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder – which is probably why a lot of your exes and crushes look alike, now that you think about it.
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