Are average faces more attractive?

 

In 1878, when Francis Galton discovered how to overlay photographic images, he observed that an averaged face is more attractive than an average face. In other words, averaging together lots of faces will result in a face that's more attractive than the average (or median) face in the original set — although not as attractive as the most attractive one.

The effect was re-discovered in 1990, and, ever since, researchers have speculated as to why.

However, a problem with these studies is the way the faces are "averaged". Typically, it means calculating the average pixel values of the faces. But unless you first align the faces, all you get is a pinkish-brown blur. So researchers first resize and align the images so the eyes and mouths line up.

Highlight the features, hide the flaws

The result is faces where the eyes and mouths are clearly defined, and everything else is somewhat blurry. Coincidentally, this is what women do when they put on makeup. Or early movie directors did when they put vaseline on their lenses. The usual effect is to make faces more attractive.

One possibility is that our underlying faces are all fairly attractive, but become less so as we add things like fat, acne, and wrinkles. So it's possible that the averaging is just blurring out the undesirable stuff.

It would be nice to test this theory, but the dataset would have to contain lots of fat and wrinkled faces — in other words, regular people. Unfortunately, in the published studies the models were generally university students, where wrinkles are rare and obesity rates are low.

In the end, while the averaging of face pixels yields a slightly more attractive face than expected, the cause may have nothing to do with the average shape of the faces, and might instead be due to the blurring of undesirable features. To test whether a face with an average shape is more attractive, you'd need to average the surfaces of 3D models of people's heads, and that experiment is still to be done.