LAUSR

BACKGROUND Evolutionary psychologists have demonstrated that humans are attracted to individuals who possess average anatomy for the population. OBJECTIVES It is the aim of this study to prove that a composite of average facial features would be more attractive to raters than the cohort utilized to create the composite. METHODS Our male and female cohorts each consisted of 41 standardized frontal-view monochrome photos, with one composite image derived from the other forty real images. We utilized Amazon Mechanical Turk, a widely used crowdsourcing platform, to receive ratings of images ranging from 1-7, with 1 and 7 being least and most attractive, respectively. The strength of the preference for the composite over the real images was assessed by the difference between the mean rating of the composite and real images. RESULTS We received 870 respondents and 876 respondents for the male and female cohorts respectively. For the male and female cohorts, the composite image was rated significantly higher than the rest of the cohort overall and across all ages, genders, and countries of residence (all p<0.0001). For both cohorts, the strength of the preference was significantly higher for European voters and lower for South American and non-binary raters (all p<0.05). CONCLUSIONS Our study reveals that average facial anatomy is perceived as most attractive across all demographics, which we hope will serve as a steppingstone for further studies that will lead to objective cosmetic quantifications and integrating evidence-based medicine into aesthetic surgery.