Perceptions on Women Affected by Cosmetics
by Maejoy Tutor in Beauty & Wellness on Oct 19, 2011
A recent study was released by Nancy Etcoff, the Harvard Medical School’s Assistant Professor saying that women who put on makeup are viewed as more competent and trustworthy than those who do not.
The study was conducted by asking the participants to assess a selection of photographs of women basing on a number of characteristics, which includes competence, likeability, trustworthiness and attractiveness. Etcoff’s study was entitled “Cosmetics as a Feature of the Extended Human Phenotype: Modulation of the Perception of Biologically Important Facial Signs.”
According to the researchers, they were predominantly concerned on seeing how wearing makeup has an effect on the judgments of people at the instant they look at the photo and after a longer evaluation.
Nancy Etcoff, who engaged herself in this matter for more than twenty years now, explained that she is very much interested in connecting science to the study of adornment. She emphasized that her study’s main objective is to concentrate closely on what we look at when we assess or evaluate an individual, and what those tools do.
The study included two groups of participants, each group with more than 100 participants. The researchers asked the participants to evaluate the photographs of women’s faces, having variations of “color cosmetics”, which was put on by a professional makeup artist.
For the first group, the researchers gave the participants 250 milliseconds to see the photographs of women. On the other hand, the second group was given unlimited quantity of time to evaluate each photograph.
The results have revealed that cosmetics really have an automatic and significant impact in terms of the attractiveness evaluations. More outstandingly, cosmetics have provided supplementary stimuli for the face, which influences a more deliberative and long term assessment on social factors like trustworthiness and likeability.
Etcoff was also joined by researchers from Proctor & Gamble Cosmetics, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston University, HMS, and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
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