Women’s faces rated more attractive even by other women, study finds
A recent study has found that women's faces are rated as more attractive than men's, even by other women. This 'gender attractiveness gap' is observed across various cultures and diminishes with age, nearly disappearing by the time individuals reach their 80s. The research, which analyzed over 1.5 million ratings from 17,000 faces, suggests that structural differences in facial features contribute to these perceptions of attractiveness.
- ▪The study compiled the world's largest dataset on facial attractiveness from 52 studies across 76 countries.
- ▪On average, female faces are rated more attractive than about 60% of male faces.
- ▪The attractiveness gap diminishes with age, vanishing around 80 years old.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 21 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ Study finds females more attractive — The Sydney Morning Herald
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| Original publisher | The Guardian — Science |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/may/27/women-faces-rated-more-attractive-study |
| Publication time | Tue, 26 May 2026 23:01:11 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-26T23:22:55.340Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-26T23:22:55.340Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Fzmn6dFey8se · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
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The research gathered together the world’s largest dataset on facial attractiveness, drawing on 52 studies in 76 countries. Photograph: Michele Piacquadio/AlamyView image in fullscreenThe research gathered together the world’s largest dataset on facial attractiveness, drawing on 52 studies in 76 countries. Photograph: Michele Piacquadio/AlamyWomenWomen’s faces rated more attractive even by other women, study finds‘Gender attractiveness gap’ appears across cultures and over centuries but difference fades away with ageIan Sample Science editorTue 26 May 2026 19.01 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleWomen’s faces are rated as more attractive than men’s, even by other women, but the perceived gap declines with age and all but vanishes by the time people reach their 80s, researchers have…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Guardian — Science.
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