#Fresh Friday | What If Beauty On The Outside Didn't Matter

Photo by: Jason Carncross

What if beauty on the outside didn't matter at all, and beauty on the inside did? ... What would you look like?

One of the schools we spoke to on the #SELFMADE Tour a little girl called me over to ask me a questions. I walked over and she looked at me for a second and then said "Do you wear a lot of make up?" I kind of laughed and said no naturally because i don't. She said she noticed and that other Designers she likes do and she doesn't like that part. It was super cool to get called out by a little girl for that.

Researchers Alex Jones at Bangor University and Robin Kramer at Aberdeen University in the U.K. photographed 44 early-20s white women, all of whom had just washed their faces, with a Nikon D3000 SLR camera in a naturally lit room. Then they gave them “a range of best-selling foundations, lipsticks, mascaras and blushers,” and told them to apply the products as though they were getting ready for a night out.

The women did so.

The researchers took their photos again.

Here’s an example of how the models looked before and after:

Alex Jones/Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

Then, the researchers replicated, altered, and arranged each model’s photos so that they progressed in a series from clean-faced to fully made-up. Each progression looked something like this, except with 21 images for each model:

Alex Jones/Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

They showed the photo series to 44 Bangor University students. For each model’s series, the subjects were told to select the photo that best represented what they themselves thought was most attractive, the one they thought most women would like best, and the one they thought most men would like best.

Suffice it to say, ladies who frequent da club might have been dropping a fortune at Sephora for naught.

The female participants thought the models looked better with slightly more makeup than the male participants did. However, all of the participants thought male observers would want the models to be wearing more makeup than female observers would.

They were wrong—men and women preferred the same amount. And that amount was less than the models had actually applied.