Both sexes agree on the ideal amount of makeup to enhance attractiveness, but completely misread what others want.
The amount of makeup that looks most attractive is about 40 percent less than many women use.
Whether judged by other men or women, less is more.
In other words, many women apply makeup past the point they need to in order to increase their attractiveness.
For the research, a group of students were photographed with and without their makeup.
From these, psychologists created a series of images including varying degrees of makeup.
People were then asked to look at the photos and choose the one that looked most attractive.
People also judged what might look most attractive to other people.
Makeup mistakes
The first finding was simply that people judged the pictures with about 40 percent less makeup than women typically wore to be most attractive.
However, when people tried to imagine what others would say was most attractive, an interesting bias appeared.
Both men and women thought that other people would find more makeup more attractive.
The bias was particularly strong for men.
Men thought other men were attracted to a lot of makeup, but none of them were attracted to women wearing heavy makeup themselves.
The study’s authors think that by wearing too much makeup women are trying to conform to stereotypical ideals:
“Our female observers indicated the amount of cosmetics for optimal attractiveness was lower than the amount worn by the models, who were a sample of similarly aged peers.
This suggests that while there is a sense of what is optimally attractive, it may be overlooked in order to conform to stereotyped ideals, and mistaken notions of what others will find attractive.
The study was published in the The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (Jones et al., 2014).
