Women and men integrate facial information differently in appraising the beauty of a face

Facial beauty plays a crucial role in social interactions, particularly in mating and reproduction. Therefore, the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms used for facial beauty assessment should be susceptible to different evolutionary and cultural pressures across genders and thus shape different observational appraising strategies. Using a novel approach, I evaluated the observers' subjective and unique importance given to specific facial attributes: eyes, nose, lips, and hair, and their spatial organization in the process of appraising the beauty of the whole face. These importance measures reveal the modulation of the integration of attributes strategy across the gender of observers and the sex of face. The degree of agreement about the beauty of the studied facial attributes was modulated across gender of observers and, for women observers, also across sex of face. Finally, I show that beauty appraisal can be mainly explained by a simple additive manner of isolated facial attributes appraisals.