Across many cultures, both men and women rate female faces as more attractive, and women exhibit this preference even more strongly than men
By Michael Le Page
6 June 2025
Women’s faces are widely considered more attractive than men’s
AleksandarNakic/Getty Images
Female faces are regarded as more attractive than male ones, a large study involving 12,000 people around the world has found. Surprisingly, women are even more likely than men to rate other women’s faces as more attractive.
“When we look at the rater sex, we see that the preference for female faces is much stronger for female raters,” says Eugen Wassiliwizky at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Germany.
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In most mammals and birds, it is males that evolve features that make them attractive to the opposite sex, Wassiliwizky says. For instance, male mandrill baboons have vivid red and blue faces.
“Females are usually the choosy sex,” he says. “This is the mechanism that made males look more flamboyant.”
But as biologists from Charles Darwin onwards have noted, humans seem to be unusual in regarding females as “the fairer sex”.