Although there’s certain factors such as symmetry, averageness and sexual dimorphism
that makes a face attractive, what this channel is yet to delve into is how our own backgrounds
influence our perceptions of beauty.
In a 1993 study by Zebrowitz and colleagues, 24 Korean, 20 White American and 24 African
American male college students had their faces rated by members of their own ethnic group.
They found that judges agreed more strongly on what’s attractive when judging their
own ethnic group.
In other words, familiarity with a certain facial ‘prototype’ helps us evaluate beauty
in different ways.
This idea of a facial prototype relates to philosophy through Plato’s theory of forms.
I’ll paraphrase and simplify it for you; essentially what we have on Earth, in tangible
forms (something we can see and feel) is an imperfect imitation of it’s abstract idea.
If I were to ask you to draw a tree, depending on your skill you’d draw either this to
this, in theory it won’t be perfect no matter how hard you try..
But if I asked you to imagine what a tree looks like, in your mind you have a general
idea of what the perfect tree looks like.
In my mind I also have an idea of what the perfect tree looks like and our visualisations
might not be the same, but they’re both trees.
This idealistic tree is the ‘prototype.’
Now through exposure to different faces, typically in the West, it’s European Caucasian faces,
we’ve come to develop an idea of what the ideal European face looks like.
It’s why they’re the highest on almost every cross cultural attractiveness study.
Not because the participants are trying to push an ethnocentric agenda, but because they’re
not as experienced at evaluating other faces from other ethnicities.
One of the criteria for attractiveness is sexual dimorphism.
In Caucasian faces, due to increased familiarity it’s easier to spot sexually dimorphic traits
between males and females, but as this paper Burke Et al explains, participants were less
familiar with differentiating dimorphic features between African faces.
As such, the women rated considerably lower, not because they were far from the average
or had some kind of physical deformity, but because the raters didn’t know how to properly
evaluate their faces due to a lack of an ideal prototype.
Did they prefer more Beyonce or Adut Akech faces?
They didn’t have time to form these facial ideals because of a lack of repeated exposure
and so were unable to properly evaluate averageness and dimorphism.
Then they repeated the test by producing mixed race faces and all of the test groups were
rated as considerably more attractive by their own and other ethnicity judges as they had
more diverse features which made it easier for everyone to judge.
Faces with considerable facial averageness, in the sense that they have no unusual or
distracting features, approach this idealised prototypical face.
These prototypical faces are formed from repeated exposure[a], especially from our parents.
We tend to choose features that resemble our opposite sex parent[b], so maybe Freud was
right.
Likewise, modelling and high fashion plays a role in choosing what to expose for that
current paradigm.
In Racial Ethnocentrism by Martin JG 1964.
The Black Nigerian test group and White American test group had more in common in determining
attractiveness than the African American and Nigerian group in regards to Black female
faces.
Despite being ethnically similar, their cultural standards were different.
Also, Rural Sengalese and British judges found considerable common ground when rating American
faces in Silva Et Al’s paper.
This is best seen in Coetzee Et al’s 2014 study where White Scottish and Black South
African students were asked to judge the opposite sex for their own and the other ethnicites
test subjects.
They hypothesized that South African students in Pretoria would have more in common, beauty
standard wise with the Scottish students for White faces, as South Africa is multicultural
with many people of Dutch European descent and thus there’d be more European familiarity.
In contrast the Scottish group would have more difficulty in agreeing with the South
Africans in determining attractiveness for the Black faces as they haven’t been exposed
to as many.
The results showed exactly that with slightly stronger correlation for ideal female European
faces than ideal male European faces.
Which makes sense as female faces are more common in general media, allowing a stronger
prototype of the face to be built.
So what can we take away from all of this.
These experiments highlight the universality of facial attractiveness.
Subjects with the most symmetric, dimorphic and average faces were still the most attractive
in all of the studies.
The cultural aspect plays a role in how well you’re able to evaluate these features.
Culture trains the eye to look for different things, but good genes are still good genes,
regardless of whether you can see it or not.
What we look for in faces depends on exposure, with the neoclassical Caucasian female face
being the most common in modern media.
As a result, Nigerian nationals can judge European faces better than Black American
men can judge their own.