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Human beauty lies in the subjective eye of the beholder
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder - this statement is well known to most people. Many of us have arguably quarreled with friends about which actresses or actors are the most attractive. Often the opinions here are very different.
Now researchers in the journal "Current Biology" report that "such differences of opinion are the result of personal preferences". These are "unique for each individual and shaped by their own experiences". In other words, it can be said that even identical twins are not always of the same opinion on this subject.
Some aspects of attractiveness are quite universal and may even be encoded in our genes. Many people tend to find faces that are symmetrical, beautiful. In addition to such well-known preferences, but humans have an individual taste and prefer different "types".
The sense of beauty is conditioned by genes as well as personal experience. (Image: contrastwerkstatt / fotolia.com) Individual aesthetic preferences determine attractiveness
Laura Germine of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston (USA) and her colleagues write in Current Biology that the individual aesthetic preferences of about fifty percent of faces agree with other people. The other half could differ and is influenced by many factors in each person.
The beauty ideal is "shaped primarily by experience and not by the genes". These experiences are very specific to each person. "It's not about which school you visit or how much money your parents earned. To see attractiveness in a face has much more to do with individual experiences, "said the research team in the study report. These are composed of unique social interactions. Friends, acquaintances, people in the media, but also the face of our first love can determine these very own experiences.
Study with 760 pairs of twins rated 200 faces
The research team initially studied the facial preferences of over 35,000 volunteers who had visited their website (http://www.testmybrain.org/setup.php?b=309). The findings were used to develop a highly efficient and effective test. This deals with the individual and unique preferences related to the attractiveness of a face. Then, more than 760 twin pairs were interviewed and examined for their preferences by assessing the attractiveness of 200 faces. The couples were made up of 547 identical twins and 214 couples of same-sex, non-identical twins. Both female and male twins were interviewed.
Results prove that the perception of beauty is not influenced by genes
The result was amazing. For the identical twins, the matches were not larger than in the group of non-identical couples. From this data, the researchers concluded that genes are not crucial to the perception of attractiveness. Rather, the environment and personal experiences shape the individual's sense of beauty. These experiences are very specific for each individual. In contrast, the ability to recognize a face is genetically conditioned. The researchers had already published a study on this topic in 2010. (As)