DO
GENTLEMEN
REALLY PREFER
BLONDES?

Many years ago the behavioral psychologist Arthur Aron put opposite-sex college students in a room and asked them to reveal intimate details of their lives: their most embarrassing moments, what they’d do if their parents died, and so on. Then he paired them up, man and woman, and told them to lock eyeballs for four minutes. No talking, no smiling—just gazing. Deep gazing, like lovers. Later, Aron quizzed the students on how they felt about their partners. Deeply attracted, most said. So deeply that a couple that were strangers on the day of the experiment allegedly got married six months later. You might open the heart by sharing intimacies, but, evidently, you reach it through the eyes.

Looking directly into a lover’s eyes is like looking into fire. As Nietzsche put it, “If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” Thanks to a shot of adrenaline, your palms sweat, your breathing gets shallow, your skin feels hot, and your pupils dilate. Your amygdala, the center of the brain that processes emotion, blazes with activity. At the same time you produce dopamine, a “feel-good” neurotransmitter that is associated with passion and addiction, and oxytocin, a hormone related to bonding. So intense is the mutual gaze that there’s only one way to amp it up: deeply penetrate your partner’s eyes during slow rhythmic sex, as prescribed in the Kama Sutra (not recommended with a stranger).

The most fascinating theory about eye gaze is that just the act of doing it can enhance, or even initiate, a feeling of love. Most of the time we think that our faces reflect what’s going on inside our heads, but, for at least some people, the expression on their face becomes a genuine feeling. Psychologists call this facial feedback, and Darwin was among its first believers.

The facial feedback hypothesis was borne out in experiments at Clark University and the University of Alaska. At Clark, more than seventy opposite-sex strangers, under the pretext of an ESP study, silently gazed into each other’s eyes for two minutes. Participants who were previously assessed and known to respond emotionally to their own facial expressions reported a significant increase in passionate love for the strangers in whose eyes they had gazed. (The gaze must be mutual and nonthreatening.) At the University of Alaska, eye-gazers who scored high on a standard psychological test known as the Romantic Beliefs Scale had the same experience. Men and women who felt strongly about concepts such as a “one and only love,” “love at first sight,” and “love will find a way” felt a significant surge of romantic love after locking eyes.

According to the facial feedback hypothesis, you might feel tenderhearted toward people after gazing into their eyes because you’re acting like a person in love. If anyone saw you softly gazing at someone, they’d think you were in love. You’re conscious of the facial muscles that create the expression on your face that everyone sees, and you internalize it. Your neural reward circuits fire up, and you feel how you act. It’s no wonder that professional actors whose characters are in love often fall in love with each other on the set. Of course, causal facial feedback works only if you’re aware of and respond to your personal bodily cues. Not everyone does; you may need to be primed by a previous emotional connection or have strong romantic beliefs.

Assuming you are a romantic, gazing into another person’s eyes makes that person appear more attractive to you, and just might help you fall in love. But is it real love? That remains to be seen.

The film Kinsey, a biopic about the provocative twentieth-century sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, reenacts a moment from one of his famous lectures on the human body. Kinsey turns to a prudish young woman and asks, “What organ in the human body can expand its size a hundred times?” She blushes crimson. “I’m certain I wouldn’t know,” she replies. Kinsey raises his eyebrows. “I’m talking about the iris of your eye,” he says chidingly, and remarks that the young lady could be disappointed if she persists in her way of thinking.

It turns out the iris and the pupil are erotic in their own right. The iris is the colored part of the eye surrounding the pupil, and the pupil is the black “bull’s-eye” of the eyeball. The muscles of the iris expand and contract the pupil from less than 1 mm to nearly 10 millimeters in diameter. The pupil is arguably the face’s most blatant and bewitching feature. A wide-open pupil intensifies a person’s gaze. Those big black holes suck you in, like it or not.

Everyone knows that pupils dilate in the dark, but there’s more to it than meets the eye. In the 1960s, the psychologist Eckhard Hess discovered that pupils also dilate when people are aroused or emotionally charged. Women’s pupils dilated when they saw images of children or male nudes, and men’s pupils dilated when they saw female nudes. It’s an involuntary reflex of the sympathetic nervous system.

Pupil size is also detected unconsciously. When Hess asked men to judge two pictures of a woman that were identical in every way but the woman’s pupil size, the guys overwhelmingly preferred the version with larger pupils. Forced to explain why they thought the woman was more attractive in that picture, the men shrugged and said she just seemed prettier and more feminine. No one consciously noticed the difference in her pupils.

Evolutionarily speaking, men prefer big, gaping pupils because they’re a sign of arousal and receptivity. If your pupils are dilated when you’re talking to a guy (and you’re not drunk or drugged), it’s a sign that you’re attracted to him. Your pupils dilate widest around ovulation, the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle, and when you’re fairly young. As you grow older, your pupils can’t dilate as much as they did in childhood and young adulthood. Big pupils are cues of youth, fertility, and receptivity—in the subconscious male mind, a sight to behold.

Women, meanwhile, are less enthusiastic about men with big pupils. A study at York University in Canada found that gals prefer guys with medium-sized pupils. While men regard pupil dilation as a promising sign of arousal, women are often suspicious of it. A wound-up, wild-eyed guy might force you to have sex, or he might be madly overpossessive or somehow out of control. (The few women who preferred men with big pupils tended to also prefer “bad boys.”) If a man’s pupils are too big, a woman’s might contract.

While you’re walking down the street, you pass a person so drop-dead gorgeous that everyone—male, female, straight, gay, tourist, octogenarian, and infant—turns his or her head and says, “Oh!” What is it about that face? What magic do the beautiful have that most of us lack? Even poets struggle to find the words. Emily Dickinson simply said, “Beauty is not caused. It is.”

Where poets rhapsodize, scientists analyze—neuroscientists, psychologists, and anthropologists have all taken a stab at deconstructing facial beauty. Overall, they’ve focused on three measures: averageness (how closely the size and shape of facial features match the average), symmetry (how closely the two sides of the face match), and sexual dimorphism (how feminine or masculine the face appears). We’re only talking about facial shape and features here, not age, expression, or complexion.

You might think the first one, averageness, seems odd. By definition, isn’t average just average? But most of us don’t have average features. When compared to the average, your eyes may be too wide or close-set, your eyebrows uneven, or your nose too sharp. When a batch of faces is “averaged” to make a computer-generated composite, judges rate the composite as more attractive than any one of the faces that constitute it. The more faces blended in the composite, the more attractive the result.

Blending races helps, too. Psychologist Gillian Rhodes asked Asians (Japanese) and Caucasians to rate the attractiveness of male and female faces. Subjects from both cultures thought mixed-race Eurasian composites were much more attractive and healthier-looking than composites of all-white or all-Asian faces. Double-checking her results, Rhodes did another study using the faces of actual Eurasian people, not composites, and reached the same conclusion. The biracial faces were judged better-looking. Maybe that’s why so many models come from Brazil, where so many people are biracial or multiracial.

So what draws us all to the middle? Researchers have several theories. For one, familiarity breeds attraction—we learn to identify patterns in the faces we see, and calibrate our perceptions to match these known patterns. Averaging all the faces we’ve seen, medium proportions would be more familiar to most of us than distinctive features such as potato noses, wide-set eyes, underbites, and chipmunk cheeks. (However, if you grew up around people with distinctive features, you’d probably find them more attractive than someone who did not.) Distinctive and unattractive features may be telltale signs of undesirable recessive genes. Looking at portraits of the inbred Habsburgs, you can see how members of the ruling house of Europe shared the same DNA to the extent that their looks and health suffered—it shows up in their protruding lower lips, misshapen noses, and doorknocker mandibles. Poor Charles II had a jaw so deformed that he could not chew.

Even an infant might turn her nose up at the Habsburgs, according to studies that suggest that “beauty detectors” are hardwired in our brains. Remarkably, babies who have had very little previous exposure to people have the same facial preferences as adults. Infants as young as one day old, when exposed simultaneously to beautiful and unattractive faces, consistently gaze longer at the attractive faces. The neural mechanism that enables babies to distinguish beautiful from beautiless is unknown, but it is widely agreed that it exists. People from different cultures also generally agree on what faces are hot or not.

Beauty isn’t created equal, as you might expect. There’s beauty and there’s bedazzling beauty. The most striking faces are close to the average but with certain optimal “tweaks.” Evolutionary psychologist David Perrett demonstrated this by taking a composite of an attractive female face and selectively modifying her features, gifting her with higher cheekbones, larger eyes, and shorter distances between her mouth and chin and nose and mouth. This tweaked composite won the beauty contest over the attractive averaged composite in the way that supermodels trump catalog models. It turns out that atypical features can enhance a person’s looks—but only in the right place on the right face.

Symmetry, the second measure of beauty, can make or break the equation. Look at actress Gwyneth Paltrow for an example of a beautiful but slightly atypical face. Her mouth is wider than average, and so is the space between her eyes. On another person these distinctive features might not be so stunning, but Gwyneth’s face happens to be perfectly symmetrical. This is also true of hotties such as Denzel Washington, Kate Moss, Christy Turlington, and Cindy Crawford (minus the mole).

Not all beautiful faces are symmetrical and not all symmetrical faces are beautiful, but symmetry often plays a role in attraction. Like averageness, symmetry suggests developmental stability. If you grow up with symmetrical features—despite risk of disease, genetic mutations, starvation, pollution, and parasites—there’s a better chance you’re fit and healthy and your body can ward off infection. Researchers at the University of New Mexico measured the chin length, jaws, lip width, eye width, and height of more than four hundred men and women to determine their facial symmetry. Comparing the results against each participant’s health records, they found that people with the most symmetrical features were healthier (i.e., had shorter and fewer respiratory infections and took fewer antibiotics).

Masculinity or femininity (sexual dimorphism) is the third measure of attractiveness. In men, the hormone testosterone is behind prominent jawlines and cheekbones, thicker brow ridges, larger noses, smaller eyes, thinner lips, facial hair, and a relatively long lower half of the face. Women are attracted to rugged, masculine faces because they signal strong immune systems and, potentially, high fertility and social status. Strikingly, women’s levels of the hormone estrogen influence how attracted they are to masculine faces. The higher a woman’s estrogen level, the more she is attracted to cues of masculinity (see page 124). Estrogen is also behind the beauty of female faces. It plumps out women’s lips and skin and produces smaller and pointier chins, smaller noses, rounder cheekbones, eyebrows high above the eyes, and a bottom of the face that is narrower than the top half.

Anthropologist Donald Symons, who in the 1970s first proposed that average faces are beautiful faces, said that we all have “beauty detection” devices in our heads, and it appears he was right. We calculate averageness, symmetry, and sexual dimorphism as easily as Newton calculated numbers. But remember: These three rules only represent physical attractiveness in a general way. Researchers haven’t been able to measure the beauty in a person’s eyes or the exquisiteness of an expression. For that greater truth you still need poetry.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty.

—Keats

To find out exactly how quickly we can tell if a person is hot or not, neuroscientists Ingrid Olson and Christy Marshuetz devised a sneaky experiment. They exposed men and women to a series of pre-rated faces, some gorgeous and others homely, and asked them to rate their appearance. The twist was that the faces flickered on the screen for only thirteen milliseconds—a flash so fast that the exasperated viewers swore they didn’t see anything. Yet when forced to rate the faces they thought they didn’t see, the judges were uncannily accurate. Without knowing why, they gave good-looking faces significantly higher scores than unattractive ones.

The fascinating implication here is that beauty is perceived subconsciously. It’s not as if the subjects had much time to meditate on anyone’s hotness—they weren’t even aware of seeing a face. To a great extent, first impressions of people’s looks are less about choice and culture and cultivated tastes, and more about something deeper and universal. Judging attractiveness seems to happen just as automatically and matter-of-factly as judging identity, gender, age, and expression.

When you see an attractive face, reward centers of your brain known as the nucleus accumbens and orbitofrontal cortex are stimulated, as well as the amygdala, which captures expression. You also have a specialized cortical network known as the fusiform facial area, which, in a glance, may process a person’s whole face: its contour, configuration, and features such as eyes, nose, and lips. It takes coordination between these areas of the brain and others, including the temporal and occipital lobes of the right hemisphere, to form a complete impression of a person’s appearance. While some parts of your brain can capture a face in thirteen milliseconds, up to two hundred milliseconds may actually tick by before other parts process the face and a perception emerges on the screen of your consciousness.

Even so, you’re faster than you think.

To tackle this tough question, Lisa DeBruine, a psychologist at the Face Research Lab at the University of Aberdeen, photographed the faces of 150 young heterosexual male and female subjects. Then she did something ingenious with their photos. Using computer graphics software, she blended each subject’s facial features with that of an opposite-sex composite. Basically, she made a male version of every woman and a female version of every man. The resemblance was discernible, but none of her subjects consciously detected the manipulation.

DeBruine then showed each subject nine composite faces, including the one that resembled his or her own, paired the faces in thirty-six different combinations, and asked three questions: (1) Which face seems more trustworthy? (2) Which is more attractive for a long-term relationship (marriage or similar)? (3) Which is more attractive for a short-term relationship (an affair or a one-night stand)?

It turned out that men and women gave the faces that looked like themselves the highest ratings for trustworthiness. Yes, most said, they would consider this self-resembling face for a long-term relationship such as marriage. But when they rated the face for a short-term fling, it bombed. That oddly familiar, trustworthy face was marriage-worthy—but not lust-worthy.

DeBruine’s study suggests that attraction depends very much on what you’re looking for—is it a hot date or a lifelong love? For a fling, you’re less likely to be physically attracted to faces that resemble your own; subconsciously, you prefer genetic diversity or the best-looking specimen of the opposite sex. But for long-term relationships, you might desire, or at least have a higher tolerance for, someone who looks familiar. That’s because you’re looking for other qualities, too—trust, shared values and interests, and maybe someone whose personality reminds you a little of your own. For each of us, the ideal partner has a unique blend of comfort and sex appeal. Too bad we can’t create our own real-life composites.

The preference for partners who resemble one’s parents, especially the opposite-sex parent, is known as sexual imprinting. It happens among other animals all the time. Male zebra finches go wild for females with the same markings as their mothers. Goats raised by a sheep prefer to mate with sheep, and sheep raised by a goat prefer to mate with goats. Don’t worry, no one’s hot for Mom or Pop—but there’s evidence that sexual imprinting leaves its mark on humans, too, especially in long-term relationships.

Studies on sexual imprinting have found a loose association between the looks of people’s parents and spouses. In a study at the University of Texas at Austin, kids from mixed-race marriages were more likely to marry a person who was the same race as the opposite-sex parent than the same-sex parent. Another study found that the best predictor of the eye color of a woman’s partner is her dad’s eye color. For men, the hair and eye color of his mom is the single best predictor of his partner’s hair and eye color. (Note: A guy might be more likely to marry a dark-eyed brunette if his mother is one.) However, there is less evidence of an Oedipus complex among men than the reverse, an Electra complex among women.

Anthropologists at Durham University in England and the University of Wroclaw in Poland asked forty-nine women to look at photos of fifteen men and rate each one for his desirability in short-term and long-term relationships. When the experimenters measured fifteen facial proportions in photos of the women’s fathers—including face height/face width and brow height/face height—they found that for long-term relationships, the women were more attracted to men with their dad’s facial proportions. A woman who is a daddy’s girl, or was one when she was young, is more likely to go for a guy who resembles him. Women who didn’t get along with Dad, or whose fathers weren’t around when they were growing up, didn’t have a preference.

Proving that women’s bias goes beyond men who look like themselves, a Hungarian team studied married women and their adoptive fathers. They found a resemblance between photos of the women’s fathers and husbands based on how the adoptive fathers looked when the women were between two and eight years old, the prime age range of sexual imprinting. Again, the more warmth between daughter and adoptive Dad, the more likely she was to pick guys who looked like him when he was younger.

Women’s tendency to marry men who resemble Dad, if Dad is loving, adds to the increasing evidence that women lean toward the familiar and the positive for long-term relationships. Sexual imprinting may be a by-product of the way we learn from our parents, or a general preference for what we think is typical in the opposite sex. We may be modeling our marriage on Mom’s, or unconsciously deciding that since Dad is a good parent, then a man who looks like him will be, too. It’s also possible that we link our opposite-sex parent’s personality characteristics with physical ones (for example, Dad’s thick eyebrows and strong jaw as a cue of dominance) and unconsciously seek these traits in a significant other. But remember, lest your Freudian imagination runs wild: the attraction is limited to general resemblances.

Yes, chances are good that you can tell at a glance if a man is kid-friendly. A team of researchers from the University of California at Santa Barbara, led by psychologist James Roney, took photos of thirty-nine heterosexual men ages eighteen to thirty-three, tested their saliva for testosterone, and assessed their interest in infants. Then they asked thirty women to rate each man’s headshot for qualities such as physical attractiveness and masculinity, fondness for children, and suitability in a short-or long-term relationship.

With uncanny accuracy, and only a still photograph to go by, nearly 70 percent of the women were able to predict which men had papa potential. Their cue? It could have been the shadow of a smile on some of the men’s faces, even though they were instructed to keep their expressions neutral. Or the women may have unconsciously picked up an essence of something kinder, softer, gentler, and, well, paternal in their faces. These were the men women said they’d prefer for long-term relationships. The marrying kind.

The women were also asked to rate the men’s masculinity. Again with striking precision, they were able to tell which of the men had the highest testosterone levels. Strong jawlines (a broad bottom half of the face) and facial hair were two big giveaways. High-testosterone guys were the ones women thought were hottest and the most desirable for a fling or one-night stand. They were also less likely to be child-friendly. However, to be fair, this wasn’t always true. Some masculine-looking men in the study were accurately judged as having paternal proclivities. Yes, ladies: there are guys who are both very manly and kid-friendly. They might not be the norm, but they’re out there.

From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that women are so good at telling which men are daddy material. Moms benefit from mates who invest in their children and help raise them. As the saying goes, any man can be a father, but it takes someone special to be a dad.

If your parents had you when they were older than thirty, you’ve spent your entire life gazing into faces that are maybe a wee wrinkled, a little lined. Mom and Dad might have been a little older than your friends’ parents, and so perhaps were your aunties and uncles and family friends. To you, aging faces are familiar. And what is familiar may be more tolerable (and even attractive).

In a study at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, more than eighty men and women in their twenties were shown composite images of men’s and women’s faces. Some of the faces were specially manipulated to show wrinkles, lines, bags, coarse skin, and other signs of aging. The researchers, evolutionary psychologist David Perrett and his colleagues, asked the subjects to rate each face’s attractiveness in the context of a short-or long-term relationship. They also asked the participants to record their parents’ ages.

Overall, women were kinder than men in their ratings, particularly when they looked at aging faces in the light of a long-term relationship. From an evolutionary perspective this makes sense: for marriage, women often care more about men’s companionship and status than raw sex appeal, so they often prefer older men. However, Mom and Dad’s ages played a significant role in determining how tolerant a gal would get. Women with younger parents downgraded the appearance of aging faces more than did women with older parents, and were unlikely to consider them for a fling.

Men’s ratings also depended upon the context of a relationship. For short-term relationships, they gave low attractiveness ratings to older-looking faces. No surprise here—men are biased toward youthful-looking women with childbearing years ahead, and they generally marry women who are younger. However, intriguingly, if a guy’s mother was over thirty when he was born, he was likely to be more tolerant of aging in women’s faces in the context of a long-term relationship. Only the mother’s age at his birth, not the father’s, influenced a man’s acceptance of older-looking women’s faces. (This means if you’re trying to gauge a man’s tolerance to aging faces, it doesn’t hurt to ask him about how old Mom was when he was born.) Further research will reveal if men with older moms more often marry older women. There’s evidence that women with older dads more often marry older men.

The psychologists speculate that these biases are due to sexual imprinting—the preference for mates who resemble one’s parental figures, especially the opposite-sex parent. Your parents are familiar to you, and you may value familiarity more than sex appeal in long-term relationships. Men and women with older parents might associate aging faces with traits they’ve learned to value: maturity, dependability, honesty, competence, and so on. With those priorities, they’d make their parents proud.

Bruno Laeng, a psychologist at the University of Tromsø in Norway, recruited nearly four hundred men and women and asked them to identify the shade of their partner’s eyes. Only one subset of subjects showed a clear-cut preference: men with blue eyes. Nearly 70 percent of the blue-eyed guys had blue-eyed girlfriends, whereas men and women with any other eye color, as well as blue-eyed women, couldn’t care less about the eye color of their loved ones. In a second experiment, Laeng and his colleagues altered the eye color of women in photos and presented two versions to men: one with blue eyes and the other with the women’s natural shade. Again, only men with blue eyes showed a strong bias toward the blue-eyed version.

According to Laeng, blue-eyed men are picky for a reason. They might see a woman’s soul when gazing into her eyes, but they’re also looking at her genes. Blue eyes are recessive, meaning that eyes only get to be blue in the absence of dominant brown-eyed gene variants, and are therefore rarer than other eye colors. If a couple are both blue-eyed, their child will have blue eyes. It’s virtually impossible for two blue-eyed parents to have a brown-eyed child, but if the wife cheats on the husband and conceives a baby with a guy with any other eye color, the child is much less likely to have blue eyes. Seen this way, blue eyes are a simple and predictable paternity (or fidelity) test.

Now, it’s not as if every blue-eyed guy you meet looks at your eyes and consciously thinks about his paternal legacy. The researchers say the bias is subconscious, and exactly how men learn or intuit it is unclear, but they’re right to have a niggling concern about infidelity. Approximately 3–4 percent—although some studies say up to 10 percent—of all babies born in the United States and Europe have fathers who are presumed to be their biological dads but aren’t.

Of course, the strategy is not foolproof. If a blue-eyed wife has a liaison with another blue-eyed guy, her blue-eyed husband has lost his advantage. In addition, Caucasian babies are frequently born with a neutral (often blue-gray) eye color by default, with the eyes darkening after a year or so; this could be nature’s way of protecting infants from suspicious dads. But when he discovers the truth, the blue-eyed guy might start seeing red.

CHAPTER 2 Following Your Nose

Oh strong-ridged and deeply hollowed
nose of mine! what will you not be smelling? . . .
Must you taste everything?
Must you know everything?
Must you have a part in everything?

—William Carlos Williams, from “Smell”

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