Beauty or realism: The dimensions of skin from cognitive sciences to computer graphics

As the most visible interface between the individual and the others, the skin is a key element of visually-carried inter-individual social information, since skin displays a wide array of information regarding gender, age, or health status. Adequate skin perception is central in individual identification and social interactions. This topic elicited marked interest in artists since the first development of visual arts in Antiquity. Often performed in order to identify the biological correlates of attractiveness, psychological research on skin perception made a jump forward with the development of virtual image synthesis. Here, we investigate how advances in both computer graphics and the psychology of skin perception may be turned to use in real-time virtual worlds. We propose a model of skin perception based both on purely physical dimensions such as color, texture, and symmetry, and on dimensions carrying socially-oriented information, such as perceived youth (information regarding putative fertility), markers of sexual dimorphism (information regarding hormonal status), and level of oxygenation (information regarding health status). It appears that for almost all of the dimensions of skin, maximal attractiveness and realism are the two opposite extremities of a single perceptive continuum.