This is an Easy Way to Make You More Attractive, Apparently

​We'd all like to look more attractive than we feel sometimes, and we've got great news: now you can. And it doesn't involve spending a gazillion pounds on silly beauty fads like bee stings to the face as per Gwyneth Paltrow.

No, no. Science has declared that there is an easier way for us to all look fit AF. REJOICE. 

It's all to do with your pheremones, apparently. As in, the chemicals you secrete which "trigger a social response in members of the same species​," according to the ever-reliable Wikipedia.

And although you can buy pheremone sprays in some kind of attempt to lure in unsuspecting victims, it's your natural ones that do the job best. 

Researchers from the University of Tübingen in Germany carried out an experiment which involved showing subjects pictures of women pretending either to be scared or sad. The scientists then asked the participants to guess how the women were feeling, and found that when the men felt certain about a woman's emotion, it 'lit up' the brain's pleasure circuits. Ie, they were more attracted to the women they could read.

So that'll teach us to give mixed messages, eh?

And while we're on the whole 'attractiveness' hype, a bunch of researchers from the National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris discovered that the most attractive feature in a woman's face from a man's perspective is how ​sparse ​it is.

Researchers asked men off the street what they thought of random women's faces, and found a definite preference for more sparse faces.

So essentially, men fancy women who look a bit like this? She's got a sparsely decorated face. (And can we also take a moment for my Photoshopping skills plz?) 

Okay, probably not. What the team took this to mean was a preference for a simpler face, possibly because our brains have a tendency to prefer simpler stimuli.​

And ​Dr. Julien​ Renoult​, who led the study, gave a better description of a 'sparse face' to ​Medical Daily:

"A sparse face is a face that is efficiently encoded in the brain — that is, using only a few neurons. In other words, they are easy to process in the brain," he said. "Sparse faces typically are simple, with a smooth skin texture, few wrinkles, and smooth contour lines."

So anti-ageing it is, then. Pass me the sunscreen.

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