Beauty is really in the eye of the beholder

People who use dating app Tinder judge possible hookups just by looking at faces, making instant decisions based on attractiveness. Scientists have found that the faces we fancy are shaped more by our personal experiences than genetics or other influences. People have different perceptions of attractiveness because their opinion about whether a guy or gal is sexy is based more on their personal experiences than genetic makeup or universal standards. Facial symmetry is thought to reflect good development and to find it attractive might be written in our genes.

Comparing between identical and nonidentical twins enabled the team to estimate the relative contribution of genes and environment to face preferences. Each pair of twins grew up in the same family environment, but identical twins share more of their genes than non-identical twins.

Most research on perceptions of attractiveness has focused on finding which characteristics people generally find attractive in others’ faces, Germine told Live Science. They agreed or disagreed on a face’s attractiveness about 50 percent of the time.

That’s consistent with a previous study that found that, on the one hand, fashion models can “make a fortune with their good looks” but friends can still “endlessly debate about who is attractive and who is not”, the researchers wrote in the study, quoting an earlier study of the topic. But if the identical twins’ preferences were not more similar to each other, it would suggest the environment plays a larger role, she said. In other words, they wanted to figure out what accounted for the 52 percent disagreement rate they saw in the first part of the study. They used the insights gained to develop a “highly efficient and effective” test of the uniqueness of an individual’s face preferences. Turns out an individual’s perception of beauty or attractiveness results from a culmination of his or her own experiences.

‘Women who perceived themselves as more attractive than their mates (partners) showed less interest in their current romantic relationships, ‘ said the researchers from Eastern Connecticut State University.

Basically, who you find attractive may be less about where you grew up and where you went to school and more influenced by experiences that are very unique to you. That pretty face you see apparently has a lot more to do with those experiences that are truly unique to each person: the faces they’ve seen in the media; the unique social interactions they have every day, or even the face of their first boyfriend or girlfriend.

The researchers say that the impact of personal experience on individual face preferences “provides a novel window into the evolution and architecture of the social brain”. They say that future studies could look more closely at which aspects of the environment are really most important in shaping our preferences for certain faces and for understanding where our preferences for other things-like art or music or pets-come from.