Most people don’t have a strong operational definition of what “how attractive” means—it’s not so much that people are biased, but that the question is incoherent. Even the visual components of attraction between two people have a lot of dimensions, which different viewers will combine differently.
Depending on why you want to know, I can suggest a few different paths:
1) seek professional opinion—ask people at modeling agencies whether you have looks that will sell product.
2) seek crowd opinion—there are sites where you can post a photo and see how many responses you get.
3) find ways to measure the common components of beauty (symmetry, ratios between features, etc.). 4) find ways to identify (and enhance) attractiveness to specific people rather than in general.
None of these are objective. Give that up—beauty isn’t actually objective (though there are components that correlate strongly with majority subjective reporting). Also, you don’t say “physical attractiveness”, nor “sexual attractiveness”, so perhaps you intend to mean the total package of likeability for all purposes—if so, ignore 1-3; #4 is the one which acknowledges the idiosyncratic nature of human attraction.
Most people don’t have a strong operational definition of what “how attractive” means—it’s not so much that people are biased, but that the question is incoherent.
I am not sure why do you think so—conditional on specifying a (sub)culture, most people have little trouble saying “X looks more attractive than Y”. Of course, that’s just ranking, not assigning some numerical estimate. It’s easy to pick a pair of faces which 95%+ of respondents will rank in attractiveness the same way.
I recently got a beard and had conversations with a few people about whether I look more attractive with it.
When talking with one girl she said that the effect of the beard was that I look more mature and that the question is whether that’s the image that I want to project.
In some situations looking more mature will be helpful and attractive while in other it won’t. That information will get lost when you focus on a single scale of attractiveness.
Despite matureness other qualities such as friendliness, trustworthiness and openness can also be communicate through looks and some people will count them into attractiveness while other won’t.
Most people don’t have a strong operational definition of what “how attractive” means—it’s not so much that people are biased, but that the question is incoherent. Even the visual components of attraction between two people have a lot of dimensions, which different viewers will combine differently.
Depending on why you want to know, I can suggest a few different paths: 1) seek professional opinion—ask people at modeling agencies whether you have looks that will sell product. 2) seek crowd opinion—there are sites where you can post a photo and see how many responses you get. 3) find ways to measure the common components of beauty (symmetry, ratios between features, etc.).
4) find ways to identify (and enhance) attractiveness to specific people rather than in general.
None of these are objective. Give that up—beauty isn’t actually objective (though there are components that correlate strongly with majority subjective reporting). Also, you don’t say “physical attractiveness”, nor “sexual attractiveness”, so perhaps you intend to mean the total package of likeability for all purposes—if so, ignore 1-3; #4 is the one which acknowledges the idiosyncratic nature of human attraction.
I am not sure why do you think so—conditional on specifying a (sub)culture, most people have little trouble saying “X looks more attractive than Y”. Of course, that’s just ranking, not assigning some numerical estimate. It’s easy to pick a pair of faces which 95%+ of respondents will rank in attractiveness the same way.
I recently got a beard and had conversations with a few people about whether I look more attractive with it. When talking with one girl she said that the effect of the beard was that I look more mature and that the question is whether that’s the image that I want to project.
In some situations looking more mature will be helpful and attractive while in other it won’t. That information will get lost when you focus on a single scale of attractiveness.
Despite matureness other qualities such as friendliness, trustworthiness and openness can also be communicate through looks and some people will count them into attractiveness while other won’t.