Am I Ugly?
What science says about my outer beauty
By Chip Rowe
Certainly my face isn’t for everyone. My bulbous nose drifts to the right, and my chin is a bit weak, although it’s skillfully hidden behind a goatee. It’s more difficult to hide the bags under my eyes or the fact I have lost most of my hair, which probably kept me from a career in television. And a few months ago, after more than four decades of checking the mirror daily for zits, I noticed that my right ear lobe is shorter than my left. How do you miss something like that?
And yet I judge myself to be not unattractive.* Is that valid?¹ Many researchers have examined the specifics of what we find alluring in another human face. So I decided to use these findings to critically analyze my own mug.
To get started, here is an un-retouched reference shot:
We judge a face within a fraction of a second, just as you have already judged mine. Scientists have tried to quantify universal hotness by showing photos of faces to college students and taking measurements of those consistently identified as handsome or cute. The “politically correct” view, as one research group put it,² is that…
