How to Fool People into Thinking You’re Attractive
By: Angela Volkov
Tags: Psychology, World Domination, Humor, Neuroscience, Attraction

If you’ve read my previous guide, Low-Effort Ways to Be More Likeable, you are now the toast of the town. People like you… though they can’t quite put their finger on why.

But do they lust after you?

In our appearance-obsessed culture, personality doesn’t matter. What you need are some low-effort — backed by empirical research — ways to enhance your sex appeal.

Surround yourself with mediocrity

I bet you’ve been fed self-help aphorisms such as ‘avoid being a big fish in a small pond’ and ‘don’t be part of the herd’. Perhaps you’ve even been sold the grand enchilada of lies, ‘the whole cannot be greater than the sum of its parts’?

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

The cheerleader effect is the phenomenon whereby an individual appears more attractive just by dint of being part of a group (Carragher, Lawrence, Thomas, & Nicholls, 2018; Walker & Vul, 2014). You’d be doing the group a favour too, as the attractiveness of the group evaluated as a whole is also rated as higher than the individuals’ average (van Osch, Blanken, Meijs, & van Wolferen, 2015). There might not be safety in numbers, there is the illusion of attractiveness.

The cheerleader effect is thought to arise due to the hierarchical way in which our brain encodes visual information. When looking at a group, an ensemble representation of the all the faces is created first. Only then do we evaluate individual faces in the group, which are of course all biased toward that group average (Walker & Vul, 2014). And average faces — such as composite faces created by blending together photos of numerous individuals — are attractive faces (Cellerino, 2003).

It goes to show, you have been doing Tinder right all along when you upload a profile picture featuring not only you but also fifteen of your closest friends.

Red in tooth and claw? Rawr.

Work on you sartorial sense? Sounds like effort to me! Keep donning your schlubby get-up, just make sure it’s red. Preference for the colour red is universal and observed to be equally appealing on men and women (Elliot, Tracy, Pazda & Beall, 2013; Hesslinger, Goldbach, & Carbon, 2015).

In the animal kingdom, red colouration is often associated with social dominance as it indicates health — skin vascularisation being ‘costly’ (in terms of energy) ornamentation (Elliot et al. 2010). Not to mention, the colour red put us in mind of the flush of sexual arousal (Stephen & McKeegan, 2010).

Now, go paint the town red, you gorgeous thing.

Blue eyes/Brown eyes

Simply putting on your best red dress is not enough, if you’re a woman wishing to attract a blue-eyed man, that is. In a startling display of homophily — the narcissistic tendency to attraction to those similar to yourself — men with blue eyes show an overwhelming preference for women with… ‘unpigmented stroma of the iris’.

If there’s a sexier phrase in the English language than ‘unpigmented stroma of the iris’ I’ll eat my (red) hat. The science behind it? Blue eyes provide an easily visible indicator of heritage, reducing paternity uncertainty when the father’s and child’s phenotypes match (Laeng, Mathisen, & Johnsen, 2007). I say ‘reducing’, as playing cuckold to another blue-eyed male is still a possibility.

Along with your new all-red wardrobe, consider adding blue contact lenses to your arsenal. But why stop there? Take homophily to the next level and Single White Female every aspect of your would-be sweetheart’s appearance.