October 7, 2008

• Composite hotness

  This guy did a couple of experiments on perceived beauty, utilizing everyone’s favorite website Hotorot.com.  You can read about one here, and there is a larger photo of it here. For those who don’t want to read the whole thing, the basic idea is that he took 30 photos from Hotornot, created a composite, and then morphed them to create 15 new “people”.  He then put them up for ranking, and in the end came out with the idea that fat is generally not seen as atractive, and narrower faces tend to have a highr score.  You can probably pull other distinctions from the pictures, too.  He also did some interesting composites using the women from different regions of the Ms Universe contest, as well as composites from different age groups on Hotornot.

  Now people will say that these are “just photos”, and whatnot, but if done with the proper controls,this seems to be a perfectly valid way to collect an opinion from a large population, albeit you have no idea how the age groups of the participants break down.  That is, who is doing most of the rating, 16-year-olds or 30-year-olds.

  Heck, if you’ve been around sites like this, you understand that even those with photos play this game through cropping and what is known as the Myspace angles.  Essentially, they are both used to create a setup that hides large or noticeable issues.  Interestingly, using this plays not so much into teh mind of the rater, as it does on the fact that the individual that is photographing themselves have self-confidence and self-image issues.  Rather than work to change what they do not like, they work to hide it.  For those of you that need help understanding, examples of teh angles can be found here and here.

  Black 6, out.

  • 12:37 pm
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