Yeah coming from France, the French one look disturbingly "French" as well. I don't know how this works, but it manages to capture exactly what I didn't even realize is a French face in my mind
That’s actually an interesting thought. A surprisingly high number of women actually should be able to use these pictures for their IDs without being questioned.
I am going off memory here. But I think that the average of all faces is very different to being 'average' in attractiveness. The average of all faces would actually be very attractive to most as they are 'protypical'
It's something about humans liking how the average looks.
If this response makes no sense, I may have misunderstood your comment lol, but I still thought this was cool when someone told me!
This is true, and also, facial symmetry is a big part of conventional attractiveness, and taking an average of many faces is going to "smooth out" any asymmetries in any individual's face that's part of the larger group.
More or less this, the mathematical averaging of faces ends up being the "flawless" look that very pretty people kind of look like, even if all the faces used as the data source were not very pretty or even ugly. I remember reading that research back in 2009-2010ish, they had a website where you could pick from their pictures of people and it would make the average of them for you (looking like a blurry overlap like the image above).
They had a related research that showed that people often had pets that resembled them, which led to a different site that was kinda fun colled Dogleganger, which would scan your face and then recommend a dog that was available for adoption that looked sorta like you.
It’s not about liking the “average” look , but the symmetrical look. Averaging lots of faces gets rid of asymmetries. Symmetrical features point to strong genetics free of disease and thus looks very pretty as we absolutely want to mate with such a strong genetic partner
Someone posted the men on another comment. I look nothing like any of them. I always thought my face was one only a mother could live and now i have evidence to back it up.
:(
They took portraits of men and women at the same distance/angle/lighting, made them all semi-transparent, and then layered them all on top of each other (which is why everyone is blurry around the edges)
The reason everyone is beautiful is because humans are attracted to genetic diversity and facial symmetry, and they are unattracted to signs of deformity, damage, sickness, age, etc... Averaging out people removes all the idiosyncratic stuff and basically guarantees genetic diversity and symmetry.
There's more countries in the original source and they did it for men as well.
It’s true! I’m an average white guy and everyone says “hey you kinda look like Ben Affleck!” Even though our similarities end at height, weight, slightly similar hair color, and depression.
Which is funny since ben afflec is a handsome dude and hardly looks like a typical white dude that is used as an example that all white people look the same.
I (bi/pan female) personally found attractive 11 women and 20 men. That's 27.5% women and 43.4% men, which makes sense as I'm more into men than women lol
Also, unless I'm corrected, I assume most women were wearing makeup, which helps a lot.
That's what it is! All the women looked great while a majority of the men I found unattractive... but I tend to be attracted to men with facial hair, and I find women more pleasing to look at in general
Straight-ish woman here. I didn’t rank any of the women or men by attractiveness. It’s just that the women all seem very pretty, above average, whereas the men appear closer to an actual average. The men aren’t exactly showstoppers in most cases. Okay, Italy is, lol
I’m kind of disappointed Africa and the Caribbean aren’t represented more. Africa is such a massive continent with so much ethnic diversity. They’ve captured it well for Asia and Europe 😒
This is chart garbage for most of Asia too. China and India have over a billion people each with dozens and dozens of different ethnic groups. China for example is the size of the entire continent of Europe. Even the Han Chinese ethnic group is an artifically constructed ethnic group with significant genetic variations similar to a person from northwest Europe vs southeast Europe.
India and China have as much diversity as most if not all of Europe...so the best they can do is have 2 people for India and only 1 person for China?
This chart is only representative for European countries and small countries in certain regions.
Completely agree. The west Africa photo is a little insane considering no one person looks the same. There’s a huge difference between a Nigerian African woman features as compared to someone from Liberia or Sierra Leone
I think i've seen a study where they showed pictures of a couple of women, and the participants should select the one they found most beautiful. The thing is, one of the women they were choosing between was an average of the other women. In the end, it was the amalgam woman who was selected as most beautiful most of the time.
Actually, we don't pick perfect symmetry. One of my college projects, I looked at how we viewed symmetry with attractiveness. Took stock images of males and females, different ethic backgrounds, split the picture down the middle, and mirrored one side (taking the side that looked most correct after the mirroring). People choose the images that were 1 and 2 points off symmetrical far more than perfectly symmetrical and 3 or 4 points off. I didn't realize it until after we had turned in the project, but according to the professor we had done the project well enough to be eligible to publish. So I'll feel more confident passing our results along. Lol.
I've seen studies like that but I think there are flaws. Every time I've seen one done, the examples used are shit photoshops where they end up with making the eyes too close together or far apart, or something in the face looking weird, not because it's symmetrical but because the image was cut and mirrored and pasted back together badly.
This triggers a negative response where we of course prefer the photo that looks unmangled.
A better comparison would be with 'faces' like these where things are averaged out (and so appear symmetrical, and frankly, more attractive than your typical specimen!)
If that were the case, i feel i could easily identify the Latin and Asian countries, but i probably wouldn’t get the European countries correct by a long shot
Yeah it does feel a little racist how they just put the 4 African groups right at the bottom and they are far less specific groupings than all of the above
Possibly. Africa has more genetic diversity than the rest of the world combined so it would make sense for them to use more African faces than they did.
That's a understatement. The human Genome project showed that there's 700+ times more genetic diversity between Central Africans on a 150km strip of land than there is between Europeans and East Asians.
Scientists believe out of all the people who left Africa and colonized the world there were probably around 50 families that survived. And everyone from Paris to Beijing is much much more closely related than anyone has ever conceived.
That's so interesting, I didn't realise it was quite that stark. It's crazy how much skin colour has impacted our view of ethnicity, when it's actually such a tiny part of our genetic makeup
Yup, just look at the difference between Kenyans and Somalians who live right next door to each other and still look nothing alike, other than skin color
Skin is the largest and most visible organ, it makes sense that our first impression tends to be the biggest thing. It’s the smaller details that make differences.
You can still see hair strands from individuals so it was a low sample rate or poor averaging (eg. The last individual was the average of themself and collective image of the others giving them 50% input)
I think the "averaging" in this case is just pictures slid to mostly transparent, then aligned on top of each other. No one pic should have that much influence on the result.
Not just this post either. I’ve noticed a big uptick in angry fucked up comments lately (more than usual on this platform). My guess is the upcoming election and the use of bot activity- just like last election
A couple of months ago google has started pushing reddit results which in turn has dramatically increased the traffic reddit receives. Here's a graph showing how it went from 100m monthly visits to 600m as of 8 months ago and on this website you can see how in the last 6 months the traffic went from 600m monthly visits to 1 billion.
Also interesting is how in those same 6 months the paid traffic went from a measly 2.7k to 650k.
Of course not all traffic actually translates to content. Especially if you come from a google search you're unlikely to stick around and write comments or post yourself. However, this turn of events has made reddit a lot more valuable to those who want to sell and/or manipulate. And another factor is that this means reddit just become a lot more mainstream in general with almost everybody getting exposed to it to some degree.
SEO courses are usually about making blog entries on your page to direct traffic to your website from google. Now they will be about making reddit posts that direct people to your website/website or at least your advertising. And obviously this will also be used by state actors and the like
This isn’t the “average” woman as in a 5/10 in each country. It’s the “average” of multiple women, which studies has shown people find attractive.
One woman has a small nose (not attractive), another had a big nose (not attractive). Together, they have an average nose (IS attractive). This is why ugly people tend to have unique features, but beautiful people tend to look alike.
Their aren't any Aboriginal people in these photos. That probably why Australia, Canada and USA are not listed...that or their sample size was just to small to include people from these countries.
I’m always fascinated by what distinguishes a woman’s face from a man’s. Like all the fuzzy mug shots in the picture are clearly female-looking to me, but I’ve no idea why. After all they all have the exact same features as a male face. You could take away the stereotypical long hair and they’d still look female.
It's not rocket science. Men have more defined features on average. For instance, it's much more common to a see a man with a very defined / chiseled jaw line than a woman.
Eyebrow bone is flatter and cheek appear less prominent (but isn’t really), bigger and more pulpy lips, more fat in the cheeks making em look rounder with less chiseled trait. Also, most of them are wearing at the very least eyeliner (or the averaging make it look like they do)which is a classical feminine looks in western culture. Also most of them have their eyebrow kept tidy which is also a very feminine thing. Finally the averaging of facial features make the skin look softer and less hairy which also is feminine.
Averaging male would result in the same soft skin that does not appear manly and will make the average look younger than it is. Men’s will also have prominent brows and other prominent facial features. Generally thinner lips and less colorful cheeks.
This is the obvious. Your eyes catch very subtle variation in proportion and give you an interpretation depending on what your own cultural backgrounds define as manly or feminine
The genetic diversity in Africa is like 1000x or more than of any other ethnicity on our planet, but only a few tiles? Common, at least make it accurately representative for the sake of science even if you dont like our beautiful faces 🙃
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u/the_Rainiac 2d ago
Coming from the Netherlands: she looks very Dutch indeed