Beauty is a unique perception based on personal experiences that any individual has with their friends and peers more so than with their family.
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The study found that the impact of such unique personal experiences is so deep that even identical twins don’t agree.
This is especially startling because genetics determine much of our abilities and preferences- even our ability to recognize different faces is genetic.
Writing in the journal, Current Biology, the authors explain how the findings fit with the fact that fashion models can make a fortune from their good looks, while friends can endlessly debate who is attractive and who is not.
Germine and Wilmer say that past research on the way people respond to faces has focused primarily on universal features of attraction.
They also wanted to know what sorts of factors may contribute to “the eye of the beholder”, and where disagreements on facial attractiveness come from.
To tackle this question, the researchers first studied the face preferences of over 35,000 volunteers who visited their science website TestMyBrain.org (http://www.testmybrain.org/setup.php?b=309); they used the insights gained to develop a highly efficient and effective test of the uniqueness of an individual’s face preferences.
They then tested the preferences of 547 pairs of identical twin and 214 pairs of same-sex, non-identical twins by having them rate the attractiveness of 200 faces.
About 78 percent of the time the identical twins disagreed on whom they found attractive, which means that, at the end of the day, the environment in which they grew up influenced their perceptions more, the researchers said. The resulting data allowed researchers to come up with “individual preference scores”, or the measure of how much each participant’s ratings differed from the average ratings of all people taking part in the study.
Previous research also found that the more symmetrical a person’s face is, the more attractive they look, Laura Germine, a psychiatric researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, stated.
The perception of beauty is based on unique individual experiences that have little to do with what is marketed as handsome by the manufacturers of clothes and cosmetics and oddly is not genetic in origin either. However, if the identical twins’ preferences were similar compared with those of the fraternal twins, it would mean that genes were more important when deciding whom they find attractive.
It’s not about the school you went to, how much money your parents made, or who lived next door.
Beyond that, an individual’s idea of attractiveness was shaped by that person’s own unique experiences, including exposure to media images, social interactions, and even the appearance of a first boyfriend or girlfriend.
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The authors of the study say their research provides a “novel window into the evolution and architecture of the social brain”, while lending support to the claim that environment shapes individual notions of what is attractive.
