[Music] hey everyone Jaclyn Howard here they say beauty is in the eye of the beholder now we may not all agree on what's beautiful but it turns out how our brains judge and process attractiveness is universal so to figure out how we decide what's hot and what's not I spoke with Dr Kong Le he's over at the University of Toronto and Dr Pam pallet who's at Ohio State University they co-authored a 2010 study about female facial attractiveness facial attractiveness that's what drives our reproduction our draw to other people and so it's an important question to ask what makes a person attractive and how this attractiveness works but the researchers found way more than just that they discovered a few myths and facts that may have you second guessing your own thoughts on attractiveness for example have you ever heard of the golden ratio ancient Greeks believed Beauty was represented by a ratio of 1 to 1.618 so whether that proportions in art architecture or even your face some people might think that's what makes things attractive however as we have found in our experiments that for each person on our face we actually have some intrinsic ratio between the distance between eyes and distance for example between our eyes and mouth that make our face look attractive because of this facial ratio a simple haircut can make you look like a supermodel overnight how exactly well if it changes the optimal ratio of your face see the ideal ratio is when the distance between your eyes and mouth measures about 36% of the length of your whole face and when the distance between just your eyes measure measures about 46% of your fa's width so getting bangs for instance can shorten the apparent length of your face got it but what about extremely attractive people are they physiological outliers do they kind of step outside the norm the more average a face is the more good-look the face is basically what our brain does is we go around in our environment picking up people's faces and making an average out of these faces we see on a daily basis and because of that then we actually in our head we have a representation of the average of the face so there's something we have genetically that is driving us to prefer to look at something that's average forming an average like that is actually beneficial in terms of your ability to process information because it makes it easier to encode that information they also mentioned there's yet another Factor behind how attractiveness Works see we have what's called sexual dimorphic cues they make us more attractive to the opposite sex for women this means our feminine traits like bigger eyes and Fuller lips and many of us play up these traits for attractiveness hello with makeup but does it really work so by adding eyelashes you actually set up a high contrast between your eyes and and the surrounding areas of your face so there's the high contrast makes the face toward the eyes more attractive to others and similar with the color of the lips and the surrounding skin so the larger that contrast is the more feminine a woman will appear and you can imagine the usage of makeup in promoting that one study in France even found that waitresses wearing red lipstick got bigger tips from Men in a recent study out of Gettysburg College found this whole contrasting of facial features helps us decipher how young or old someone looks but do only humans work to make themselves more attractive sexual selection across species is what causes either a male or female to land a date or a mate by appearing more attractive we already talked about makeup right well some research suggests that even flamingos apply a makeup of their own during mating season now it's not Covergirl but both male and female bird birds will apply a natural oil on their feathers to pop a little more pink so what do you think is beauty really only a matter of biology and is it out of our control how does that affect modern relationships come on Talk Nerdy To [Music] Me