The Beguiling Truth About Beauty

Carlin Flora

Not a knockout? We all focus on our imperfections. But seeing yourself as others do casts you in the best possible light. Turns out that self-knowledge is the most important beauty secret of them all.

Don't hate yourself for wanting to be beautiful. Good-looking people get special treatment from strangers, employers and even their own mothers. The comely reap real social and economic gains in life, from broader romantic proposals to lighter punishment in criminal courts. The rest of us curse the advantages of beauty because we can never claim membership in the knockout club.

Or can we? We're not even close to objective when it comes to judging our own looks. Other people see the whole package. But when we look in the mirror, we're liable to zero in on the imperfections. That bump on your friend's nose? It's her trademark! It gives her character! But to you, that thing on your nose is downright disfiguring. Our opinion of our own looks is also capricious: We can feel like the belle of the ball at one party, but downright shabby at the next, all on the same night.

So if we can't trust our own self-appraisal, or the reassurances of friends and family, we're left to the cool judgment of strangers to satisfy our curiosity about our appearance. The Web site "Hot or Not," which lets people anonymously submit their photos for others to rate on a 10-point scale, had nearly 2 million daily page views within a week of launching in 2000. Not exactly the best way to bolster your self-image.

The good news: You're almost certainly hotter than you think. It's partly a matter of limited attention—everyone else is too fixated on his or her own appearance to be critical of yours. If you are particularly attentive to your body (as women tend to be), or if you feel uncomfortable in public, you are almost definitely hotter than you think. And we all have the innate ability to change how other people perceive us, without a physical transformation of any kind. When you're convinced you look good, others see you in a more favorable light. Call it an internal makeover: Understanding your own powerful self-perceptions can help you stop obsessing over your appearance—and look better.

Why is it that our self-judgments shift like weather on a spring day? Even a stroll down a street can change the way you think about your looks. Our brains have a built-in hot-or-not meter that never stops gathering data.

Psychologists call it the "contrast effect": You feel prettier around ugly people and uglier around pretty people. These social comparisons happen not only when you deliberately scrutinize passersby, but constantly and automatically. In one study, people given a subliminal glimpse of an attractive female face subsequently rated themselves as less attractive than those who saw a homely one, though no one remembered having seen the images at all. Our self-concepts are built on thousands of these comparisons.