Beauty Really Is In The Eye Of The Beholder: Perception Of Attractiveness

Beauty is a unique perception based on personal experiences that any individual has with their friends and peers more so than with their family.

“So when you’re watching TV and Brad Pitt comes on the screen and one person says, ‘Oh, he’s a 7 out of 7, and the other says, no, he’s only a 5, ‘ most of that discrepancy is largely a mystery, said study co-author Jeremy Wilmer, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Wellesley College”. In the future, the researchers hope to gain more insight into which types of experiences have the largest influences on face preference. If genes were more involved in facial preference, identical twins would have had similar ratings; if the influence of a familial environment carried more weight, fraternal twins would have also answered similarly.

A universal view of what is an “attractive” person might be somewhat of an illusion, a new study points out, showing that individual experiences shape how people rate the looks of others around them. So much so that even twins who grew up in the same family may not agree.

“We looked at adult twins who had been out of the home for 10, 20, 30 years and so had very different life experiences.” explained Germine. “Beyond such limited shared preferences, however, people really do have different “types”, they added. In the test, the participants expressed preferences for 50 different male and female faces by rating their attractiveness on a scale of 1-7.

In fact, the study showed that even identical twins – who share almost 100 percent of their DNA – aren’t attracted to the same people, suggesting that it’s our experiences, more than our genes, that determine whether we find someone hot or not. The research team then used that test to analyze the preferences of 547 pairs of identical twins and 214 pairs of same-sex, non-identical twins by having them rate the attractiveness of 200 faces.

The idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder has been around for a long time, said Laura Germine, a psychiatric researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and lead author of the new study.

The researchers first studied the face preferences of more than 35,000 volunteers who visited their science website. Moreover, these experiences are unique to each individual. Researchers found that people’s individual environments accounted for the vast majority, 78 percent, had differences in how people perceived attractiveness. However, in the new study they wanted to know more about where disagreements over facial attractiveness come from.

Our ability to recognize human faces seems to be baked into our genetic code.

Ever wondered why you do not find your twin or cousin’s crush attractive?

In other words, it is not education, economic standing or who lived next door that makes the difference.

These could be based on the faces you saw in the media when growing up, your unique social interactions each day – and even the face of your first boyfriend or girlfriend.