Latest Face Tester Determines if You Would Judge Another as Sexy

Do not judge a book by its cover, they say but most often we all judge people by their looks. A novel computer model can now determine how a person would judge another's character or personality by their face. With the help of this individuals' can now create an appealing avatar of themselves on online dating sites to give a good impression about themselves to the viewer.

Knowing that we all judge people and their character by their face, Tom Hartley the University of York, UK, and his colleagues analysed 1,000 photos of faces to find out which characteristic of the face is most important in helping another judge him. The photos were rated by people on their trustworthiness, superiority and sexual attractiveness, all merely by the look of the faces. It was seen that people assess a person's sexual attractiveness within milliseconds. The team also took into account the measurement of the different features in the individuals face, the width of the face, curvature of the lips, were they wearing glasses etc.

The information they collected along with the volunteers' ratings were fed into programs that was designed to find correlations in the data. They found that some of the characteristics of the face when observed in a combination influenced the onlookers judgements. People with a smiling, open mouth and wide nose were tend to be judged as trustworthy.

Using this information they created faces through the computer that looked sexy, trustworthy or dominant, to confirm the correlation. A different set of people were asked to rate the computerized faces and it was seen that their judgements were very similar to what they had predicted them to be. Hartley said, "If we put all the social impressions on a scale from 0 to 100, we find that, on average, the model's predictions differed from the judges' ratings by 9.8 points." The model was able to predict their scores for each face.

Hartley also stated that participants found it easier to spot trustworthy faces than sexually attractive or dominant ones, as this trait was related to the smile and warmth of a person. "Judging whether someone is a friend or foe is probably an important part of what you have to do when you see a face. This is worth taking into account when using social media or including a photo with a job application," said Hartley. He also suggested that while uploading a selfie on the internet, it is best to chose one that would create the impression you want it to.