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Well, I’m shocked. According to a study reported in The Guardian, face masks actually make you make more attractive.
There have been precious few positives during the Covid pandemic but British academics may have unearthed one: people look more attractive in protective masks.
Researchers at Cardiff University were surprised to find that both men and women were judged to look better with a face covering obscuring the lower half of their faces.
Dr Michael Lewis, a reader from Cardiff University’s school of psychology and an expert in faces, said research carried out before the pandemic had found that medical face masks reduced attractiveness because they were associated with disease or illness.
“Our study suggests faces are considered most attractive when covered by medical face masks. This may be because we’re used to healthcare workers wearing blue masks and now we associate these with people in caring or medical professions. At a time when we feel vulnerable, we may find the wearing of medical masks reassuring and so feel more positive towards the wearer.”
Of course, this is pure conjecture.
The first part of the research was carried out in February 2021 by which time the British population had become used to wearing masks in some circumstances. Forty-three women were asked to rate on a scale of one to 10 the attractiveness of images of male faces without a mask, wearing a plain cloth mask, a blue medical face mask, and holding a plain black book covering the area a face mask would hide.
The participants said those wearing a cloth mask were significantly more attractive than the ones with no masks or whose faces were partly obscured by the book. But the surgical mask – which was just a normal, disposable kind – made the wearer look even better.
“This relates to evolutionary psychology and why we select the partners we do. Disease and evidence of disease can play a big role in mate selection – previously any cues to disease would be a big turn-off. Now we can observe a shift in our psychology such that face masks are no longer acting as a contamination cue.”
So not wearing a mask is evidence of disease?
Lewis said it was also possible that masks made people more attractive because they directed attention to the eyes. He said other studies had found that covering the left or right half of a face also made people look more attractive, partly because the brain fills in the missing gaps and exaggerates the overall impact.
Yep, that’s why women the world over are rushing to buy niqaabs.
Left: A woman wearing a niqaab. Right: A woman wearing face mask
But back to the study. What the article doesn’t tell you is the participants were 43 Cardiff University undergraduate Psychology students. That is the same university where Lewis was one of the researchers. So it’s not much of a stretch to say at least some of the participants would know each other and have the same shared opinions. Not to mention being influenced by Lewis himself.
Second, there’s nothing to say that the faces were “normalised”, that is they were all the same level of attractiveness. And who’s to say that most weren’t butt-ugly and that a mask would of course make them more attractive?
Thirdly, most of the participants happened to agree with the statement “The use of face masks is effective in preventing the spread of COVID-19”
So in summary we have a study involving a questionable control group, biased participants, and at least one biased researcher.
Still, had the study been done fairly and reached the opposite conclusion it is unlikely that it would have been reported in the media. They do have a government narrative to reinforce after all.
