Facial Adiposity, Attractiveness, and Health: A Review

Abstract

The relationship between facial cues and perceptions of health and attractiveness in others plays an influential role in our social interactions and mating behaviors. Several facial cues have historically been investigated in this regard, with facial adiposity being the newest addition. Evidence is mounting that a robust link exists between facial adiposity and attractiveness, as well as perceived health. Facial adiposity has also been linked to various health outcomes such as cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, blood pressure, immune function, diabetes, arthritis, oxidative stress, hormones, and mental health. Though recent advances in the analysis of facial morphology has led to significant strides in the description and quantification of facial cues, it is becoming increasingly clear that there is a great deal of nuance in the way that humans use and integrate facial cues to form coherent social or health judgments of others. This paper serves as a review of the current literature on the relationship between facial adiposity, attractiveness, and health. A key component in utilizing facial adiposity as a cue to health and attractiveness perceptions is that people need to be able to estimate body mass from facial cues. To estimate the strength of the relationship between perceived facial adiposity and body mass, a meta-analysis was conducted on studies that quantified the relationship between perceived facial adiposity and BMI/percentage body fat. Summary effect size estimates indicate that participants could reliably estimate BMI from facial cues alone (r = 0.71, n = 458).

Social Perception of Faces: Brain Imaging and Subjective Ratings

“…Our behavioral results support the previous findings that facial adiposity is highly correlated to attractiveness judgement [31,32] in that the highest two BFP conditions were perceived to be less attractive than the lower BFP conditions. The strong correlation between the curvature patterns for attractiveness and health also support the previous findings that there is a strong correlation between perceived attractiveness and health [31,32]. We also found a strong correlational relationship between the curvature patterns for dominance and masculinity.…”

“…As an implication of our findings and as suggested by other authors [32][33][34], future studies using face images should consider standardizing BFP across all images to reduce adiposity-related confounds. In studies of facial adiposity, using a control measure to set up a baseline of preferred BFP level for each participant could also be considered.…”

“…Relevant behavioral studies have found that people implicitly associate pathogen infection with obesity as a heuristic cue in automatic perceptual judgement [30] and that people use facial adiposity as a reliable cue in judgement of health [31]. As an important matter of methodological consideration for the studies on the social perception of faces, studies show that people can reliably estimate the overall adiposity of a person based on the perception of weight in the face, and that there is a robust correlation between facial adiposity and perceptions of health and attractiveness [31,32].…”

Shifts in Female Facial Attractiveness during Pregnancy

“…Similar shortcomings (faces of different individuals in each group of women) probably also bias perceptual ratings of the facial attractiveness markers regarding individual faces. Moreover, visual evaluations of facial attractiveness markers such as symmetry, averageness, femininity, or adiposity, as well as other perceived facial qualities, are usually significantly correlated with attractiveness and with each other (e.g., [ 54 , 55 , 56 , 57 , 58 ]). Consequently, conclusions from ratings of potential pregnancy-related changes in attractiveness and its markers would likely be limited.…”

Do 3D face images capture cues of strength, weight, and height better than 2D face images do?

“…There now exists a large literature examining the extent to which physical characteristics, such as formidability and health, can be accurately assessed from face images (for reviews of this literature see De Jager et al, 2018 andPuts, 2010). The results of such studies have implications for evolutionary theories of the signal value of facial characteristics in both human mate choice and intrasexual competition (De Jager et al, 2018;Puts, 2010).…”