Psychological research shows clearly that average faces are attractive. Faces generally become more attractive when they are blended (morphed) with other faces (Langlois & Roggman, 1990) or when they are distorted toward the population average (Rhodes & Tremewan, 1996), and natural variations in averageness strongly predict attractiveness (Halberstadt, 2006; Light, Hollander, & Kayra-Stuart, 1981; Rhodes, Sumich, & Byatt, 1999). Rarely has a psychological phenomenon been demonstrated to be so robust; indeed, to our knowledge, no published study has indicated that averaging produced a face that was less attractive than the original faces from which it was generated.
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Halberstadt et al. (2013) studied this question.
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