Want to know if you’re attractive? Look at your friends

Forget about finding the most stylish outfit and coiffing the perfect hairdo, if you want to look attractive it’s all about selecting the right friends, a new study says.

According to researchers from the University of Royal Holloway London, hanging out with people considered less attractive will actually make you look that much better-looking than if you were judged alone.

“Rightly or wrongly, the way people look has a profound impact on the way others perceive them,” lead author Dr. Nicholas Furl says in a statement. “We live in a society obsessed with beauty and attractiveness, but how we measure and understand these concepts is still a grey area.”

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Up until now, Furl says, attractive qualities were believed to have been somehow fixed. However, this research demonstrates attractiveness can actually fluctuate, making context important to assessing beauty.

“Until now, it’s been understood that a person’s level of attractiveness is generally steady,” he says. “If you saw a picture of George Clooney today, you would rate him as good-looking as you would tomorrow. However, this work demonstrates that the company we keep has an effect on how attractive we appear to others.”

4:04 Science behind attraction

In the study, participants were asked to rate pictures of different faces for attractiveness one-by-one.

Then they were asked to assess the same faces placed alongside ones perceived to be unattractive. When researchers added what they called “distractor faces,” the desirability of the same faces increased from the first time they were ranked. These “distractor faces” for researchers were images of people who would typically be considered unattractive. (If you’re looking for more information on what being attractive means, click here.)

In the third step, participants were then shown two attractive faces alongside a distractor face and were asked to judge them. Because of the presence of the distractor face, viewers were more critical of the attractive faces.

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“The presence of a less attractive face does not just increase the attractiveness of a single person, but in a crowd could actually make us even more choosey,” says Furl. “We found that the presence of a ‘distractor face’ makes differences between attractive people more obvious and that observers start to pull apart these differences, making them even more particular in their judgment.”

A previous 2015 study out of Queen’s University also explored the subject of attractiveness. Researchers there found that consistency of the whole appearance, rather than the attractiveness of individual parts of the body, is what people use to determine the desirability of other people.

“There are many ways in which we decide who we are attracted to,” says Furl. “There will certainly be more research in years to come on this complicated area of human interactions, and I am excited to see where this research takes us.”