The face, beauty, and symmetry: perceiving asymmetry in beautiful faces.
The relationship between bilateral facial symmetry and beauty remains to be clarified. Here, straight head-on photographs of "beautiful" faces from the collections of professional modeling agencies were selected. First, beauty ratings were obtained for these faces. Then, the authors created symmetrical left-left and right-right composites of the beautiful faces and asked a new group of subjects to choose the most attractive pair member. "Same" responses were allowed. No difference between the left-left and right-right composites was revealed but significant differences were obtained between "same" and the left-left or right-right. These results show that subjects detected asymmetry in beauty and suggest that very beautiful faces can be functionally asymmetrical.
Zaidel
D W
DW
Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095-1563, USA. dahliaz@ucla.edu
Cohen
J A
JA
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D001504:Beauty; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology; D002755:Choice Behavior; D003201:Computers; D005145:Face; D005146:Facial Asymmetry; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D014796:Visual Perception