Beauty Filters and the Brain: Why Filtered Faces Feel More Attractive

We have a very interesting relationship with beauty filters. The idea of them falls into the category of ‘ love to hate’ in one camp and ‘won’t film without” in the other.

The reason we love them is simple, they exploit and magnify our visual preferences. 

Filters amplify many of the things we see as attractive.

• smoother skin

• clearer complexion

• facial symmetry

• Bigger /brighter eyes

• fuller lips

• stronger contrast around the eyes and mouth

The visual contrast has a really solid impact. The cleaner the contrast, the more noticeable the visual cues. Filters often brighten the eyes, darken lashes, define brows, sharpen lips, and smooth surrounding skin. That nothing new, people have been using makeup to do that in real life for years. The difference is these  filters  automating and exaggerating  it.

Stacking onto of that is the halo effect, a tendency to associate attractive faces with other positive traits, like health, intelligence, confidence, happiness, and sociability.

Theres a really interesting relationship between these two. On one hand , exaggerated beauty becoming the new norm on the other the assumption that this beauty correlates directly to aspirational characteristics.

Recent studies are exploring the preference we have for filtered faces and the idea that they are  ‘more attractive’ than their unfiltered versions. 

So yeah there is a reason we like filters.

Here are a couple links to some of the articles I found while researching 

This article by the 

What is beautiful is still good: the attractiveness halo effect in the era of beauty filters

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39606589/

National Library of Medicine 

Facial attractiveness: evolutionary based research

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3130383/?utm_source=chatgpt.com#s2