Further investigation of the effects of wearing the hijab: Perception of female facial attractiveness by Emirati Muslim men living in their native Muslim country

Abstract

The hijab is central to the lives of Muslim women across the world but little is known about the actual effects exerted by this garment on perceptions of the wearer. Indeed, while previous research has suggested that wearing the hijab may affect the physical attractiveness of women, the actual effect of wearing the hijab on perceptions of female facial attractiveness by Muslim men in a Muslim country is largely unknown. Accordingly, this study investigated the effects of the hijab on female facial attractiveness perceived by practising Muslim men living in their native Muslim country (the United Arab Emirates). Participants were presented with frontal-head images of women shown in three conditions: in the fully covered condition, heads were completely covered by the hijab except for the face; in the partially covered condition, heads were completely covered by the hijab except for the face and areas around the forehead and each side of the face and head; in the uncovered condition, heads had no covering at all. The findings revealed that faces where heads were uncovered or partially covered were rated as equally attractive, and both were rated as substantially more attractive than faces where heads were fully covered. Thus, while wearing the hijab can suppress female facial attractiveness to men, these findings suggest that not all hijab wearing has this effect, and female facial attractiveness for practising Muslim men living in their native Muslim country may not be reduced simply by wearing this garment. Indeed, from the findings we report, slight changes to the positioning of the hijab (the partially covered condition) produce perceptions of facial attractiveness that are no lower than when no hijab is worn, and this may have important implications for wearing the hijab in Muslim societies. Finally, we argue that the pattern of effects we observed is not explained by anti-Islamic feeling or cultural endogamy, and that a major contributory factor is that being fully covered by the hijab occludes external features, especially the hair and lateral parts of the head and face, which, when normally visible, provide a substantial perceptual contribution to human facial attractiveness.

Retracted Article: Hijab Protects Adolescent Girls and Women from Sexual Harassment

“…22 Faces where heads were uncovered or partially covered were rated as equally attractive, and both were rated more substantially to be more attractive by men than faces where heads were fully covered. 23,24 Pazhoohi and Hosseinchari 25 showed that men were more motivated to view women exhibiting the less veiling and rated them more attractive than those women whose bodily curves were less visible. These results show that the hijab suppressed female attractiveness to both men and women.…”

Perceptions Reasons and Barriers in Observing Purdah (Hijab) among Female Undergraduate Medical Students

“…The attractiveness of female face was lower as compared to fully covered. Partial and uncovered appeared more attractive to men as a general perspective [24]. This study is quite different and do not match with the present study but interesting perceptions were noted.…”

Responses to the Islamic headscarf in everyday interactions depend on sex and locale: A field experiment in the metros of Brussels, Paris, and Vienna on helping and involvement behaviors

“…There are at least three candidate reasons for this. A first possible source of different responses among men and women is the fact that men, including Muslim men in Islamic States where the hijab is commonplace, consistently judge women who wear the hijab less facially attractive than women who appear with uncovered hair [29,30]. If attractiveness has an impact on overall person evaluation, and assuming that women's judgments of attractiveness are unaffected by the hijab, men's appraisals of hijab-wearing women should be more negative than those of women, leading to a more important decrease in nonverbal involvement and similarly in the probability of offering assistance ("attractiveness hypothesis").…”