You are less beautiful than you think!

Hello Everyone!

Many of you may have seen the recent, and popular, Dove commercial called " “Dove Real Beauty Sketches.”  In this video a forensic artist stretches a drawing of a woman as she describes herself to him.  A stranger also describes the woman to the artist.  When the drawings are revealed, the drawing based on the stranger's description is more beautiful than the other based on the person's description.  The message is that "you are more beautiful than you think."  If you haven't seen it yet, you can watch the video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpaOjMXyJGk&safe=active

But is this true?  A recent article in Scientific American reviews the psychological research and finds that the opposite appears to be true.  For example, Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago and Erin Whitchurch of the University of Virginia have demonstrated that we tend to see ourselves as more attractive than we actually are.  Researchers digitally altered images of participants.  These images were either made to be more or less attractive than the real picture.  When asked to select the unaltered image, participants chose the attractive one. 

Read more about this interesting research at:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=you-are-less-beautiful-than-you-think&WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20130521


Kristin H. Whitlock