Face masks make people look more attractive, study finds

While the Covid pandemic has brought with it nothing but misery and uncertainty, there is apparently one positive; face masks make people more attractive.

Researchers at Cardiff University have found that both men and women were judged to look better when the lower half of their faces were obscured by a face mask.

And even more surprisingly, the study found that blue disposable face masks were deemed as more attractive than patterned cloth masks. 

Dr. Michael Lewis, a reader from Cardiff University’s school of psychology and an expert in faces, explained that research carried out before the pandemic had found that medical face masks reduced attractiveness because they were associated with ‘disease or illness’.

@adityapradpt / Unsplash

So when masks became common place during the pandemic, Dr. Lewis and his team wanted to see if the perception on face coverings had changed. 

The first half of the study was carried out in February 2021, by which time the British public had become used to wearing masks in public settings.

There, forty-three women were asked to rate on a scale of one to ten the attractiveness of images of male faces without a mask, wearing a plain cloth mask, a blue medical face mask, and holding a plain black book covering the area a face mask would hide.

The participants said those wearing a cloth mask were significantly more attractive than the ones with no masks or whose faces were partly obscured by the book. But the blue disposable mask made the wearer look even better.

@tonichealth / Unsplash

Dr. Lewis told The Guardian: “We wanted to test whether this had changed since face coverings became ubiquitous and understand whether the type of mask had any effect.

“Our study suggests faces are considered most attractive when covered by medical face masks. This may be because we’re used to healthcare workers wearing blue masks and now we associate these with people in caring or medical professions.

“At a time when we feel vulnerable, we may find the wearing of medical masks reassuring and so feel more positive towards the wearer.”

He added: “The pandemic has changed our psychology in how we perceive the wearers of masks. When we see someone wearing a mask we no longer think ‘that person has a disease, I need to stay away'”.