The Weird Thing Women Actually Notice First About A Guy's Face, According To Research
Research says women's brains zoom in on this when first meeting a guy.
Oleg Shatilov | Unsplash It's been mentioned before that men are pretty simple beings when it comes to sizing up who they are attracted to.
Some people even narrow an intimately-motivated decision happening in as little as ten seconds — a simple once-over, yay/nay, and then off to a fantasy football draft.
Us ladies? Blame it on feminine intuition or inherent pickiness, but a study proves that women are multi-layered when deciding aesthetic attractiveness.
According to their research, the weird thing women notice first about a guy's face is their lips, jawline, and cheekbones.
iona didishvili / Shutterstock
In the 2009 study in an issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, a group of researchers sought to analyze what exactly goes on in our pretty little heads when deciding whom we're most attracted to and why. The two levels women evaluate attractiveness boil down to a physical level and a non-physical level.
On a physical level, women focused on specific facial features, including cheekbone and jawbone structure, and the fullness of their lips.
It is a two-step process, which makes us a bit more complex, and we also know how not to drool after the first pretty thing that we see. The researchers rounded up 50 heterosexual women and showed them pictures of both men and women.
Each woman had to rate on a scale from 1 to 7 as to whether they saw each man as a future date or each man or woman as a future lab partner. (Lab partner? Well, we guess that's a scientist's version of "just a friend.")
The article says "date" and lab partner" were meant to weed out attraction from aesthetic appeal. They theorized women would be more likely to want to splice embryos with someone they find good-looking but not necessarily hot or alluring.
After the results were tallied, the scientists then took the same headshots and split the faces horizontally, shifting both parts away from each other so that the features were no longer aligned.
The scientists then asked the same question: date or lab partner? to a new group to see if the halved faces had any effect. Would women be less likely to be attracted to split faces?
On the contrary. Instead, they found the dateable pile (i.e., attractive for whatever reason — square jaw, rugged stubble, etc.) was pretty stable, as were any results with the female pictures.
However, there were some discrepancies with the ladies when deciding who they wanted to see in a lab coat. The split images affected who they trusted with their beakers.
The scientists concluded that women are drawn to attractive faces regardless of whether the chiseled square jaw or swoon-worthy eyes are in the wrong place, yet women need to see the entire face before truly trusting.
Or as they say, women use and can separate "two ways of assessing facial appeal." Complex creatures, we are indeed.
Melissa Noble is a love & relationships writer and editor from New York. Her work has been featured across the web, as well as New York Magazine and OK! Magazine.
