Abstract
Cues available in facial skin are used to assess mate quality in humans and non-human primates. In men, perception of skin healthiness and facial attractiveness are associated with heterozygosity at genes in the major histocompatibility complex, with potential implications for securing direct benefits through mate choice. There is, however, some debate as to the precise nature of the information available in skin that is used in health and attractiveness judgments. Here we investigate whether color cues are important in discrimination of skin healthiness and facial attractiveness in men’s faces. We presented images of men judged to have attractive or unattractive faces, and healthy or less healthy skin, to independent raters in either full-color or gray-scale monochrome. Differences in ratings across these conditions indicate that hue carries additive information over that available in other skin cues (e.g. texture and tone) and that this aids discrimination of individual men’s quality, especially in judgments of skin condition. We also found significant sex and age effects on discrimination. Our results are consistent with findings from other species that color cues can signal underlying quality and that sexual selection may have contributed to the evolution of color vision in primates.
Highlights
Several authors, dating as far back as Darwin (1871), have suggested that withinpopulation variation in skin color and condition might influence judgments of attractiveness, of women’s attractiveness
Repeated measures ANOVA revealed a significant three-way interaction between Image type, Quality and Color condition (Table 1), such that the ratings given to the skin images of low quality individuals were low when viewed in color compared to monochrome (post hoc t test: t (390) = 3.37, p = 0.001) and there was little effect of color condition on high quality individuals (t (390) = 1.12, p = 0.262; see Fig. 1a)
Our results show that discrimination of high and low quality images for health varies with color information for the skin patches but that color had limited impact on discrimination of attractiveness for the whole faces
Summary
Several authors, dating as far back as Darwin (1871), have suggested that withinpopulation variation in skin color and condition might influence judgments of attractiveness, of women’s attractiveness. It has been argued, for example, that men prefer women with relatively pale skin as this is associated with youth (van den Berghe and Frost 1986, but see Fink et al 2001) and that redness of cheeks could be a signal of health (Zahavi and Zahavi 1997). While many of these traits may be inter-correlated if they are underpinned by a common currency of genetic quality (cf. Thornhill and Grammer 1999; see Feinberg et al 2005; Roberts and Little 2008), each may carry independent and additive contributions to such judgments (e.g. Saxton et al 2009)
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