Everyone has heard the old adages: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and “Beauty is only skin deep.” As nice as it would be to believe these maxims are true, research demonstrates otherwise. In fact, various studies have shown that good-looking people have a definite edge in many areas of life, including business.
How Beauty Is Defined Across Cultures
According to Sharon S. Brehm, Saul M. Kassin, and Steven Fein, coauthors of Social Psychology (2002), based upon cross-cultural studies, there is evidence to support the proposition that “certain faces are inherently more attractive than others” (p. 308). For example, irrespective of ethnicity, males are considered better looking if they have a broad jaw, and females are thought more attractive if they have large eyes, prominent cheekbones, a small nose, and a wide smile.
Additionally, according to Sheryl Jean, writer for McClatchy Newspapers, researchers at the University of Toronto and University of California found that female faces were deemed most attractive when “the vertical distance between the eyes and mouth was 36 percent of the face’s length and the horizontal distance between the eyes was 46 percent of the facial width” (2011, p. 2D).
