The impact of face skin tone on perceived facial attractiveness: A study realized with an innovative methodology

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to assess the impact of target faces’ skin tone and perceivers’ skin tone on the participants’ attractiveness judgment regarding a symmetrical representative range of target faces as stimuli. Presented with a set of facial features, 240 Mozambican adults rated their attractiveness along a continuous scale. ANOVA and Chi-square were used to analyze the data. The results revealed that the skin tone of the target faces had an impact on the participants’ attractiveness judgment. Overall, participants preferred light-skinned faces over dark-skinned ones. This finding is not only consistent with previous results on skin tone preferences, but it is even more powerful because it demonstrates that the light skin tone preference occurs regardless of the symmetry and baseline attractiveness of the stimuli.

KEYWORDS:

• Physical attractiveness
• physical symmetry
• skin tone

Notes

1. Originally, the purpose of this study was to assess the relative contribution of skin tone and symmetry on judgment of beauty regarding female faces. Then the study was refined to focus on the effect of the target faces’ skin tone and the perceivers’ skin tone on attractiveness judgments while controlling for facial symmetry, after a suggestion from a reviewer.