Men are ugly…and that is official, boffins say
New research shows women really are the ‘fairer sex’ – even among girls – but attractiveness evens itself out when folks are in their 80s
Dame Joan Collins still turning heads on the red carpet at 93(Image: Getty Images)
Men are ugly – and that is official, boffins have found. Women are seen as more attractive even by other girls.
New research appears to confirm the existence of a ‘gender attractiveness gap’ – an observation reflected in centuries of language that presents women as ‘the fairer sex’. But blokes should not despair – the gap declines with age and all but vanishes by the time folk reach their 80s.
Dr Eugen Wassiliwizky, a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany, said: “This is a super-robust effect and we see it across cultures. “Female faces are evaluated as more attractive than male faces regardless of all the other factors.
“What is most surprising is that women give other women the highest ratings and give the lowest ratings to men.”
Charles Darwin – the Victorian naturalist and father of the theory of evolution – said male animals adorned with manes, brightly coloured faces and plumage were products of sexual selection and those with the fanciest adornments got to sire the most offspring.
But Darwin said humans bucked the trend. Rather than female preferences driving sexual selection he believed men fought each other – or relied on wealth and power – to attract the most desirable women.
Biologists have debated the idea ever since.
For his study Wassiliwizky and his colleagues compiled the world’s largest dataset on facial attractiveness ratings from 52 studies in 76 countries.
The final dataset contained more than 1.5m ratings of 17,000 faces from 30,000 individuals. Their analysis found the average female face was rated more attractive than about 60% of males’.
The size of the gap was strongest in the West.
It varied slightly with sexual orientation but was still evident across heterosexual, gay, bisexual and lesbian raters. When men and women rated themselves the gap disappeared. Some of the effect is driven by sex differences in facial structure, boffins said.
On average men have more rectangular faces while women’s are more rounded.
The results suggest both sexes find rounder faces more attractive.
Details of the research are published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The study does not explain the reason for the general preference for women’s faces.
But it may be that more rounded faces appeal for other reasons perhaps because they are more similar to babies’.
In her 1972 essay The Double Standard of Aging writer Susan Sontag argued society equated the value of women with beauty and their beauty with youth but did not impose the same standards on men.
In the study the preference for female faces dropped steadily from 18 until vanishing at about 80.
“The older the faces the less we see a gap between the perceived attractiveness of male and female faces,” Wassiliwizky said.
“Male and female faces become more and more similar with age, the structural differences shrink, and this might be the reason the gap is melting.”
