Facial Beauty

As research surrounding beauty has evolved over the years, race has most recently been a variable of consideration when discussing the universal standard of beauty. Since the establishment of the universal standard of beauty, much controversy remains questioning racial discrimination, biases and generalization. Yosh Jefferson comments in “ Facial beauty- Establishing a Universal Standard” that “ many orthodontic practitioners feel that facial beauty is racially and culturally influenced” (2004, p. 13). This is perhaps more true in American culture where the model for beauty is predominantly Caucasian (Evans & McConnell, 2003). Moreover, research has attempted to ask whether this predominance has negatively or positively influenced humanity and whether there is more to examine when considering such generalizations of a “universal standard of beauty”.

One such study conducted by Peggy Evans and Allen McConnell (2003) attempted to answer these questions in their research titled “Do Racial Minorities Respond in the Same Way to Mainstream Beauty Standards? Social Comparison Processes in Asian, Black, and WhiteWomen”. Their hypothesis was based on prior research that had proven Black women to be more resilient to mainstream Caucasian standards of beauty (Evans & McConnell, 2003). Wanting to explore other minorities, they selected Asian women as their target group in hopes to shed light on multicultural social comparison processing. Evans and McConnell’s results revealed that Black women were more inclined to implement “self-protective strategies;” whereas Asian women, were more susceptible to the influence of mainstream beauty standards and thus adopted such standards when judging their own body and facial attractiveness (2003, p...

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...e question of how much of beauty is in the eye of the beholder heavily depends on the attractiveness homogeneity of the faces used” (2006, p. 208). Lastly, he also comments that future research should address differences in judge’s scoring (Honekopp, 2006).

Based on the presented researcher studies throughout this review, they attempt to use Hönekopp’s question of whether private or shared taste is influenced by race and the degree to which race influences judges facial attraction scores when lined in succession with the race and when diversely arranged. Thus our question asks “whether individuals employ the ‘universal standard of beauty’ when judging facial attractiveness? Or do individuals have specific standards of beauty per ethnicity?” We will attempt to answer this question by measuring judges’ between group facial scores through the use of several t-tests.