The Times science editor Tom Whipple investigates the world of pulchronomics – the academics who have proved that looks really do matter. Is the beauty bias the prejudice no one dares admit to?
Daniel Hamermesh didn’t set out to prove that London had an ugly filter. He certainly did not expect to conclude that the southeast of England was hoovering up the nation’s hotties and disgorging its less beautiful, less successful residents to … well … In his words, “They migrate to places like Wales”.
But was he surprised that this was what he found? He has spent a career working in “pulchronomics” – the often hidden, often controversial economics of beauty. After a career investigating the world’s last acceptable prejudice – a prejudice that affects everything from earnings to health to longevity – did this shock him? Not really.
To discover what was happening to the Welsh, Hamermesh, from the University of Texas at Austin, had been analysing a particularly unusual and particularly useful dataset.
If you were born in the UK between March 3 and March 9, 1958, then the chances are high you were enrolled in a long-running survey to study the effects of growing up and ageing. The chances are, also, that at the age of 7 your primary school teacher was asked an odd question.
One day in 1965, he or she was sent a piece of official correspondence from the UK’s National Child Development Study. It asked for help. Would the teacher, the letter asked, rate your looks?
Squinting at you surreptitiously from the front of the class, your teacher had a set of options on which to grade you: attractive, unattractive, normal or – and they weren’t given guidance on where this sat in the rating scale – “abnormal featured”. No scientist provided them with an objective standard of beauty. No one thought, rightly, it was necessary. Symmetry, good bone structure, clear complexion, slimness. Study after study has shown we know it when we see it.
So they ticked and went on with their day.
Somewhere, in a filing cabinet and on punch cards, these answers gathered dust. Their subjects, abnormally featured or not, did not. They grew up, they left school, they went to university – or didn’t. They married or didn’t. They had careers, moved home, moved country, retired.
Hamermesh already knew what to expect when he looked at their life trajectories. We are all captains of our fate, but we sail on the winds we have been given. In the past 50 years, converging data from around the world has formed a picture of what it is to have the fair winds of fair looks behind you – and what it is to embark on life tacking through the squally headwinds of attractiveness.
Attractive people earn more. If you are a good-looking man, one calculation showed that at the age of 40 your salary boost is on average equivalent to having had five years’ more work experience. Attractive politicians are more likely to win. A study in Germany found variations in attractiveness between candidates accounted for 3% of the vote.
Another, in the US, found that people could predict the outcome of gubernatorial elections just by seeing brief television clips of the candidates. By the time we get to major elections we are so familiar with the candidates it matters less. Of all the many unedifying things about the 2024 US election, whoever wins out of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, the result will not be determined by beauty. Of course, it’s also the case that by this stage the less attractive have been weeded out. (“One wonders how Lincoln would have done had there been television then,” Hamermesh says.)
Attractiveness even helps in electing scholars to the American Economic Association (economists like to study economists, especially if they can use a peer-reviewed paper to call more successful colleagues undeserving bimbos).
People find my research offensive, like talking about sec or income.
Good looks help, in fact, whatever your chosen profession. Attractive murderers are less likely to be sentenced to death, one US study found. Mind you, attractive people are also less likely to be murderers – there really is such a thing as a face for Crimewatch. Unattractive lawyers, conversely, are less likely to become litigators – if, as a law firm, you have to sway 12 people not to convict your ugly client, you want to set your very best face to the jury.
The list goes on. Friendships, marriage, self-esteem – all are areas of life that correlate with looks. Everywhere, the difference is small but evident. “If you’re not attractive, it’s a disadvantage in almost every activity you undertake,” Hamermesh says. His latest research shows this even seems to extend to life itself. The least attractive people, at least in a sample from Wisconsin, live around one to two years less.
This shouldn’t be so surprising, he says. We know that status, money and happiness all affect longevity. “During a life we suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. The outrageous fortune in this case is that some people are born and grow up to be pretty bad-looking.”
If unattractiveness was any other physical characteristic, its protection would be legislated by law. But then that would require a Germaine Greer or a Martin Luther King of beauty – someone to stand up and speak of their dream for their ugly children. It is the prejudice that still does not speak its name.
Which brings us to the British children born in 1958. They were part of a study that kept up with them throughout their lives, taking data on thousands of people from birth until death. Hamermesh knows so much about them – their lives, their health, their wealth. The purpose of his study was to use this data to investigate happiness. It was, as he expected, greater in those who, at the start of their life, had been assessed as attractive. But he also realised he had information on where they were born and where they ended up.
Given all he knew in theory, there was nothing surprising in what this revealed. The more attractive children were more likely to become economically successful and so, he found, were more likely to live in the more economically successful places. The effect, as with most of these effects, was small enough not to be visible among individuals and only noticeable at the population level. Even so, what this meant in practice is still a little jarring. “Southeast England attracts the good-looking,” he says, “and repels the bad-looking.”
This was not even the first time he had seen this. A similar longitudinal study, in Wisconsin, helpfully attached participants’ high-school yearbook photos to their files. Decades later, they were diligently rated for hotness – and the hotter the student, the more likely they had left Wisconsin after graduation.
Hamermesh does sometimes find that what he has to say is unwelcome. “People find it offensive. They say you shouldn’t be working on it. It’s like talking about income or your sex life. We don’t want to talk about it too much.” But it shares something else with sex and money. “We’re thinking about it all the time,” he says. “We do it constantly when we are walking down the street.”
Hamermesh is not, himself, that attractive. Neither is he unattractive. I’m not used to explicitly rating people’s looks. Writing two sentences like that feels incredibly rude. Rating people’s looks isn’t the sort of thing I do. And yet when I force myself to do so, I realise I have already done so – it turns out I do rate people’s looks, all the time.
So he is, for an older man, average. Since I consider myself above average – I also feel awkward saying that, but it turns out it’s also something I’m completely aware of – that gives me (adjusted for age) an attractiveness advantage. He agrees with my assessment of him. “On the five to one scale used in many studies, where five is top, I think I am a three.” But what of my assessment of me? “I think,” he says, in a completely casual drive-by shooting of my self-esteem, “you are also a three.” Just as how most people think they are above average for driving and intelligence, maybe the same is true of looks.
Some, though, cannot keep up the self-delusion. Most of us do not notice “lookism”, just as a fish does not notice water. For many of us, the concept itself is funny. But some people do notice it – the people for whom that water is toxic. On the website Reddit, there is a forum titled simply “Ugly”. It is, in its words, “A place for people that have been mistreated and rejected for their looks.”
One recent post is titled, “The day by day embarrassment of existence”; another, “Seeing myself in photos ruins my day”. A third is simply, “People treat me like I’m not even human”. Several talk about “pretty privilege”. One poster complains that beautiful people make mistakes at work and are forgiven, yet ugly people are not. More than one talks about how they have taken to avoiding contact or wearing Covid facemasks in public.
Often it is hard to tell how much of the experience is real and how much is about their own self-consciousness. But the distress is undeniable. “I’d like to be able to navigate social situations without being constantly stared at, talked about, pointed at, laughed at,” says one, before adding, in what seems a pointed dismissal of the idea it’s “what’s inside that counts”, “I think being attractive is the only way you can be acknowledged for your personality.”
Most of all, posters hate the beauty cliches – the bromides that the attractive, or even the “normals”, offer them. One talks about how he was told there would one day be a woman for him. “Really? Introduce me.” Another rails against being told to “just be confident”.
Nothing, though, annoys them more than the phrase, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” “Ugly is ugly everywhere!” one says. “It’s a bullshit line they all spew at us that NOBODY actually believes,” says another. “Let those people pour sulphuric acid on their own face and then try to live and look for a partner. Let’s see if they keep saying that phrase,” adds a third.
Dr Denise Martz, a psychologist at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, works with overweight people and is particularly interested in how society treats them. There is an obvious analogy in weight to looks in general. But there is also a difference. Sometimes, overweight people cease to be overweight. Then you can see the difference, and see that the way you suspected the world treated you was not your delusion.
“I’ve worked with some individuals who were very large in their bodies and who have lost a significant amount of weight,” Martz says. “A lot of them would have this reaction. They would say, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t believe how horribly I was treated. Now people notice me and they want to hear my opinion.’ "
Beauty, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. It’s just that across time and across the world, the beholders’ eyes agree very closely on what that beauty is.
In 2009, the singer Susan Boyle auditioned for Britain’s Got Talent. It is worth rewatching.
A woman who isn’t especially groomed and a bit dowdy arrives on the stage to sniggering. We, the audience, knew what to expect – knew what the genre demanded. This singer was going to be one of the hopelessly deluded contestants, good for a laugh in the early rounds.
But the producers (who knew perfectly well what was about to happen) had deliberately subverted our expectations. Boyle opened her mouth. The viewers, in the later words of The Washington Post, were “waiting for her to squawk like a duck”. We all agreed what beauty was, and it wasn’t her. But there was no mistaking her voice. The ugly duckling didn’t squawk. She sang like an angel.
Boyle later said that, “Modern society is too quick to judge people on their appearances.” She hoped we had been taught a lesson. And we had. We loved our lesson.
A year earlier, by an odd coincidence, there had been a very similar tale. At the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, a young, cherubic girl had sung beautiful traditional music. Afterwards, we learnt she had been lip-synching. The real singer, a girl of similar age, was not beautiful enough and was not allowed to appear. “We combined the perfect voice and the perfect performance,” the music director said. “The audience will understand that it’s in the national interest.”
Well, that might be China. But this was the West, and we were different. We were as appalled by the tale of that girl as we were delighted by the tale of Boyle. After Boyle sang, we bought album after album. So did fans around the world. To date there have been 25 million sales.
Boyle’s was, surely, a beautiful tale, with a beautiful moral about beauty, ugliness and beauty again.
Hamermesh saw something different. “It made us feel good about ourselves,” he says. “We were being charitable to the person who would not otherwise do well.”
Our initial ugly prejudice, in both senses of the word “ugly”, was, of course, classic lookism. Psychologists have a term, “What is beautiful is good.” It’s the fallacious idea that beauty in looks translates to beauty or virtue elsewhere – and the reverse. We could not believe that someone could sing beautifully without being beautiful. This prejudice is there even in the fact I could, three sentences ago, use the word “ugly” also to mean “unpleasant”.
What of her (our) redemption? It was, in an odd way, lookism too. Boyle succeeded not because she was the best singer in the world. She was good, but not the best. She succeeded because she was the most unexpected singer: an unattractive one. We congratulated ourselves on not judging a book by its cover, even as the attraction was precisely the incongruence of the cover. We weren’t that different from the Chinese after all.
There is a Roald Dahl quote that every now and then gets an airing, normally by people posting it on social media and making a point, one they consider virtuous, about political enemies.
“If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face,” Dahl wrote. “And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.” Or if you prefer a similar sentiment more snappily done, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” Keats said. Beauty, as our fairytales teach us, is good. Cinderella was beautiful; the stepsisters, ugly. The prince is handsome; his princess, divine.
Martz has analysed Disney movies in a paper titled Do Animated Disney Characters Portray and Promote the Beauty-Goodness Stereotype?. In this case, she found that what is beautiful, in terms of characters, really is a decent proxy for what is good. Even if they’re animals.
Mufasa and Simba, for instance, the lion kings, are pretty good-looking animals. Nala, the lion love interest, despite being a quadruped of a different species, is definitely a character to please the dads in the audience. Whereas the baddie, Scar? Well, the name says it all.
“We can see how this begins in childhood,” Martz says. “It starts with Disney, with princesses, with Barbie. The first thing we say of a baby girl is, ‘She’s beautiful.’ Children are exposed so early to ‘beauty is good’. And we see it. We see that children want the more attractive children to be their friends and don’t want to be friends with the less attractive children. It’s terribly, terribly sad.”
Of course, you will say, there are counterexamples. Our culture also teaches our children that beauty is skin deep, that it’s what is inside that matters, that beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder. Take, in fact, another fairytale, Beauty and the Beast. A beautiful woman finds herself locked in a house with a hideous man. Yet over the course of their incarceration, she comes to see the beauty inside and falls in love. What better moral could there be?
And yet, what is the happy ending? On winning her love, it breaks the terrible spell that had befallen him. Beast becomes his true, socially acceptable form. The happy ending is, he becomes handsome. The Ugly Duckling is even more explicit. You can say the moral is to look beyond looks. The story, though, is about a cygnet that is bullied for being ugly and then stops being bullied when it becomes beautiful.
These tales, of course, are as old as humans. We sometimes think that, with Instagram and tweakments and online dating, ours is a uniquely looks-obsessed age. The data suggests otherwise. Insofar as we have long-term findings, the advantage to beauty has been pretty constant. We have always cared, always discriminated.
Does this matter? Imagine, for a moment, if we subtly change those fairytales, to swap ugliness for another arbitrary physical characteristic. Imagine if the ugly stepsisters were instead the half-Chinese stepsisters. Or what if Dahl said, to change the quote slightly, that black thoughts give you black skin? What if the Beast was disabled, then on finding love became able-bodied?
In 2010 Deborah Rhode, a US legal scholar, wrote a book, The Beauty Bias. In it she argued, “Appearance imposes penalties that far exceed what most of us assume or would consider defensible.” As a lawyer, there was a solution – the same solution we use for other arbitrary characteristics against which humans discriminate. The law, she argued, should intervene.
Making legal rulings on the specific disadvantages of ugliness is not as odd an idea as it sounds. In fact, it has already occurred. Hamermesh has also written a book, Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful. When he started researching pulchronomics, he also started receiving some unexpected interest – from lawyers. They came to him with clients who had been disfigured in accidents, mainly dog bites. They came because, in his words, “There was money to be made.” What they wanted to know was: what was the expected earnings penalty from a scarred face? Doing the calculations and making the case in court has become a minor sideline of his.
So what do we do about this? Professor Tim Leunig from the London School of Economics is a former adviser to both Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javid. He thinks we should see this for what it is: an opportunity. “Any company wanting to get ahead – as well as do the right thing – should always hire the underappreciated. These are people who are not paid what they are worth.” So if you have two applicants who look the same on paper but not in person, then you’ll probably get a better deal on the less attractive one.
Although, depressingly, there is a counter-argument to this too. It is one reason Hamermesh thinks we are not ready for ugly discrimination laws. Our natural assumption is that discriminating against the unattractive is irrational.
But what if it isn’t? There are studies showing that attractive military commanders, attractive NFL quarterbacks and attractive professors all get better results. Not because they are cleverer or faster or braver, but because they are more respected.
“The crucial question is,” Hamermesh says, “does beauty have a productivity effect?” He, a US professor, has benefited from one stroke of genetic good fortune that society values – being intelligent. Maybe beauty is simply another, just as arbitrary, just as unfair. Precisely because people value beauty, beauty has value.
“I would love to see this attitude change. But I doubt it will happen in my lifetime or yours. We’re on a hamster wheel and the enemy is us.”
And so the pretty glide through life, unaware of their privilege, wearing a crown that only the ugly can see. Although they maybe do so just a little less often in Wales.
Written by: Tom Whipple
© The Times of London