criteria that i used for mate selection for both sexes and for the majority of animals
it's up to debate as to whether love at first sight truly exists but i think we all know it's a
bit more obvious when it comes down to attraction at first sight you're either attracted to them or
you're not with that in mind individuals who are physically attractive tend to have more options
when choosing a mate and have more opportunities to pursue a good quality mate this is one of the
underlying tenants of the beauty and cosmetics industry who seek to identify and market the
cues and predictors of facial attractiveness to make those tips and tricks accessible to
a larger population researchers have identified a number of cues in facial health and attractiveness
including averageness symmetry sexual dimorphism or things that we've talked about in the past
but there is also an additional concept that we haven't discussed which is the value of a skin
condition and the importance of recognizing facial health and attractiveness through
the quality of your skin facial skin texture and more importantly color play an important role in
observers judgments of apparent health and have been linked to aspects of physiological
health including fitness immunity and fertility existing research has confirmed this phenomena
for caucasian populations with smooth and bright skin indicating fertility fitness and health
which has led to the popularity of foundation and blush in the makeup industry which aim to mimic
exactly that a homogenous skin smoothness through foundation and increased blood flow through blush
now we've talked about the makeup aspect of this topic in more detail in our video on why
the egyptians wore eyeliner and the video on blushing can make you more attractive
however in this video we're going to put more emphasis on the contribution of skin texture
to the perceived health of faces and instead of a caucasian population we're going to look at
the other races starting off with an asian sample by tan ital 2017. this particular paper which was
funded by the schools of psychology from southeast asia and australia explored the contribution of
skin texture and color to the apparent health of malaysian chinese faces as background research the
researchers recognized why skin smoothness and color have such a strong correlation to raiders
judgments of health it turns out that skin color and smoothness directly correlate to
the skin blood perfusion and oxygenation which predicts physical fitness and cardiac health
this smoothness and rich color in the face also directly relates to the concentration
of melanin in the body which is associated with a healthy immune and reproductive system
in particular skin with a sunburned look were not perceived as healthy in stephen until study which
looked at caucasians and hannah tower 2018 which looked at mainland chinese populations unnaturally
high melanin beyond what you'd expect for that person's phenotype due to excess sun exposure
filters out much of the uv that's needed for vitamin d production and so this lack of vitamin
d production is associated with reduced emotional well-being and increased musculoskeletal pain
much of those with lighter skin tones say in the harsh australian outback such as miners
fall prey to skin cancer with australia having one of the highest rates in the world
as that skin tans and becomes leathery it's going to develop a layer of melanin quite naturally but
this comes about as a result of dangerous levels of sun exposure and again reduced vitamin d
production when the weather starts to get cooler again a similar problem is seen in those with
darker skin such as the american black population where vitamin d deficiency is especially high for
that group so it's understandable why in many of these cross-cultural studies melanin was seen
as a perceived health indicator even though it isn't necessarily true nor accurate for everyone
in fact there are many facial cues that we use to infer about a stranger's health however as cozy a
tower defined in 2009 it has to actually have a link or a direct link to physiological health to
be really considered a metric that we can use for facial attractiveness while we may assume
that someone with sunburned skin is not exactly healthy the burn does heal quite quickly however
say the sunburn creates a visible melanoma which then develops into malignant cancer
well that's a different story and that indeed is a very visible indicator because it's on your skin
in that case that could be a negative for your facial attractiveness and your perceived health
so with keeping this analogy in mind let's go back to the original study on skin smoothness
tanatar looked at simple correlations between well-defined factors of skin smoothness and
their relationship to judgments of attractiveness by raiders as asia represents a huge diversity of
cultures and ethnicities the researchers only looked at malaysian chinese faces in order to
limit the influence of diet and potential activity levels on the results of the study so 53 students
were recruited and had their photo taken from this their skin texture were rated on three factors
an independent sample of raiders made a judgment on the perceived health and the perceived
attractiveness of every face and then made graphs who represent relationships between the amount of
a particular skin factor that was displayed and how this affected their facial attractiveness
if you look towards factor one it can be seen on this graph that larger values of
this certain factor directly relate to a higher perceived rating of skin health
as well as this the same factor has a very similar relationship to overall facial health showing how
influential the skin can be in an overall judgment of the phase but just what is factor one if we
look at the bottom set of cheeks here the top left cheek has the highest values of factor
one and the bottom right cheek has the lowest value of factor one as all of this is measured
on what's known as a computer-based gaba wavelet function which all you really need to know is just
another way of measuring and quantifying the skin homogeneity in the pixels of these taken photos
very dumbed down way of understanding what factor one represents is just a lack of contrast in the
overall height between the bumps and the rest of the skin or in other words it's just the
most smooth skin tone that being said skin is one of the most malleable facial features
having the continuous ability to change color and smoothness on an almost daily basis while also
being extremely prone to acne and inflammation with that in mind our skin is perhaps the most
accessible element of our face that we can readily and cheaply improve upon without expensive surgery
this is incredibly important when we recognize how influential our skin is in these conditional
judgments of attractiveness as we're gonna go on to just a second but before you get
into that it may be worth for you to check out our earlier videos on skin
that look at the effects of sun damage in terms of speeding up the aging process the negatives of
acne and inflammation on ratings of attractiveness and a number of other terms and terminologies that
are going to make more sense for this video if you watch those first while you're doing that i
think you should also hit the like button or else the bad skin fairy is going to come and get you
looking back at our study there is a significantly large and negative correlation between perceived
skin health and factor two of skin texture and a correspondingly significant large negative
correlation between this factor and overall facial health essentially the moral factor too that a
participant displays the less attractive that they are rated factor two in again is a similar
wavelet function and it basically represents the amount and the size of the imperfections or
blemishes that your skin would have once again quite a seemingly apparent conclusion to draw
that the larger the multitude and size of your imperfections the lower the skin and face health
will be rated and this is partly because as we looked at in the previous video on acne
humans are very very disease averse if there's one thing we're scared of it's diseases and acne
is a bacterial infection and so we stay away from it this particular conclusion on having
many and large blemishes on your face is quite cross-cultural i mean it's a biological thing
over the three videos that koovs has made on skin we've seen very strong consensus in the research
that having rough skin is a very big no-no and a lot of this has to do with disease and pathology
and how we've evolved as a species being very hyper vigilant to detect skin abnormalities
third and final skin texture related factor that we're going to talk about in this study
has a similar but less extreme pattern to factor two this is a significant correlation between
higher values of this factor and lower values of overall perceived skin and facial health
in other words it's something you don't want to have if we look towards the diagram for
factor 3 with larger values represented in the top left corner and lower values in
the bottom right we can recognize that low factor 3 values represent skin homogeneity
and this is a function of skin color and texture on the flip side high amounts of factor 3 can
relate to a lack of internal consistency of the skin itself when we look at the general factors
of facial attractiveness and of averageness of symmetry and dimorphism it makes sense that
consistent and average skin in the sense that it is smooth as it's a combination of many different
skin patches of different people then obviously makes sense with the existing literature that's
been proposed ever since the 1950s on evolutionary biology and humans preferring disease-free skin
however there is a silver lining that we can talk about in each of these studies there's a
continuous outlier that we can see in all of these graphs scientific research always seeks to find
patterns in the general sample so that they can make generalizations about the larger population
but just like that scientific research will also never be able to fully recognize
the individuality of each participant these outliers could have had extremely strong and
desirable facial features with great proportions symmetry averageness all the other tenants and
could have been lacking in the skin department and so their rankings were still higher than
somebody of lesser attractiveness in terms of facial features but not as good as if somebody
just like that but with perfect skin as well what this indicates to me is that skin health is indeed
quite important but it's not to make all and be all of facial attractiveness being really strong
in another department such as having model-like symmetry or very strong facial features can make
up for not having ideal skin also a lot of people have more access to makeup now so
foundation is worn by primarily still women but men also have access to it which can make up for
any shortcomings with that being said what do we consider the opposite someone with a recessed jaw
very malformed dental facial features generally poor facial growth often due to lifestyle choices
such as mouth breathing then no matter how good your skin is it's not going to make people still
be attracted to you and there's no amount of makeup that can cover up a missing jaw a recessed
mid face very forward protruded eyes you may think that i'm exaggerating but we looked at this exact
question on your pragmatism where participants post and pre-surgery were raided on their
attractiveness and unsurprisingly once these people with misaligned jaws got their jaws
corrected their attractiveness went up by a full three or four points which is huge and so if your
only cosmetic issue is not having clear skin then consider yourself quite lucky because it
could have been a lot worse by now you probably think that skin homogeneity and color are the
most important things but there's actually some other factors to consider as well kurtietal 2012
and stephen a tower 2011 considered skin color on apparent health for black african populations
tanatal 2017 looked at asian populations while fingertile 2011 looked at caucasian ones and
what did they find well unsurprisingly the exact same thing because these skin research tests show
strong cross-cultural findings much more than you'd see for research in other topics like the
jaw the nose especially not the nose the forehead hair all of those things can more or less differ
in attractiveness or how important they are by cultures but having good skin is very important
because it's ingrained into us right from birth so we've seen from the findings of tanatar study and
finger tiles and stiffener tells that this very strong cross-cultural agreement this is something
that affects virtually everyone watching this video but it's for that exact reason that skin is
a topic that i'm personally quite passionate about because for many it provides the greatest cost to
benefit in improving your looks where non-surgical approaches such as creams and even fillers can
drastically undo decades of photo damage and poor lifestyle choices something that no surgical
approach can quite achieve for this reason we've been working very closely with dermatologists both
in our team and external to work on a skin care classifier using machine learning models and image
segmentation that takes an image of a face such as a phone selfie there's a ton of pre-processing to
get the skin regions that we need in the accurate resolution and then has a dermatologist identify
everything they can from that patch to train a convolutional neural network so basically
the dermatologist knowledge is being transferred into a computer-based application many of you have
outlined your concerns in the poll that we put up earlier which is great i'm glad to see so much
diverse criticism because criticism is good especially in the development stage
one of the most important things that i kept saying was the lack of diversity which is what
everyone has a concern about because there are so many skin care applications and machine learning
programs that just don't cater to dark skin or middle eastern latino so on and so forth
but that's definitely been our top priority in making a very sophisticated clinical classifier
and a very high accuracy but using data sets of black white latino middle eastern east south
and north asian faces and then combining their features together using a generative
adversarial network to get every possible face in between those geographical races so you know
say your face is somewhere between mongolian and russian then if we combine the two faces we'll get
some kind of a mix between those two that's the approach that we've taken and this is a very new
approach i've only seen it in the research literature since 2020 and for us it's a race
against the clock to put out research on that and show that it can actually be used as a viable way
of increasing data sets and creating every type of ethnic phase possible gin classifiers aren't
actually new ole has one ponz has one but their versions are very rudimentary and frankly useless
because if it's not accurate there's no point using it won't go too much into detail into
is how exactly we're building ours because we're using a completely different approach to be much
more accurate and have much more features but just for now just know that it's in the works and we're
hearing all of your concerns and we're working to make something that's very inclusive very
accurate and very useful for dermatologists and then secondary for retail users just like you guys
that i'll end the video so if you're interested in knowing more about this project that we're working
on or any of our machine learning and ai projects you can visit the website and try our skin care
version one prototype which was talked about by mit bbc and a number of different outlets
if you want to visit the website get accused aesthetics report and get your skin assessed
by a team of dermatologists and doctors you can also do that or you can listen to our beauty
podcast where i bring in guests and we talk about different aesthetics issues on patreon
you