What is it that makes a face look beautiful? What are the differences between very attractive and less appealing faces? For every historical period and every human culture, people have always had their own ideal of beauty. But this ideal has never been constant and is still subject to changes.
In our research project we adopted an empirical approach and created prototypes for unattractive and attractive faces for each sex by using the morphing technique prototype for an unattractive face (“unsexy face”) was created by blending together four faces that had previously been rated as very unattractive. The “sexy face” was created by blending together four of the most attractive faces, respectively (see report).
In order to find out the characteristic differences between attractive and unattractive faces, we presented pairs of one “sexy” and one “unsexy” image for both sexes to test subjects. The task was to report which facial features were perceived to be different between the two faces