Intriguingly, researchers have found that both men and women look more attractive when most of the face is obscured by a face mask, especially when it is a surgical mask.
“We wanted to test whether this has changed since face coverings have become so ubiquitous in the world, and to understand whether the type of mask has the same type of mask,” said Michael Lewis of Cardiff University’s School of Psychology and co-author of the study on the findings, published in Cognitive Research. no effect.”
Lewis explained that research conducted before the Corona pandemic found that medical face masks reduced attractiveness, because they were linked to disease, so people were afraid to approach a person wearing a protective face mask, for fear of the possibility of transmission.
He added, “But our new study indicates that faces are considered more attractive when covered with medical face masks in the time of Corona.” “This may be because we used to wear blue masks by health care workers, and now we associate these masks with people in the care professions or medicine.”
According to the study, conducted early last year, 43 women were asked to rate the attractiveness of male faces shown in pictures without a mask, while wearing a surgical mask, and while the men were holding a black book covering the lower half of their face, on a scale from one to 10.
The results were surprising: pictures of men wearing surgical masks ranked first in terms of attractiveness, and cloth masks came in second, while pictures of men without masks scored lower.
A second, yet unpublished study found roughly the same results when a group of men were asked to look at pictures of women wearing masks, Lewis told the Guardian.
“The pandemic has changed our psychology in how we perceive people who wear masks,” he told the newspaper. “When we see someone wearing a mask, we no longer think that ‘this person has a disease, I have to stay away’.”
