Facial Adiposity: A Cue to Health?

Abstract

Facial symmetry, averageness, sexual dimorphism, and skin colour/texture all serve as cues to attractiveness, but their role in the perception of health is less clear. This ambiguity could reflect the fact that these facial traits are not the only cues to health. We propose that adiposity is an important, but thus far disregarded, facial cue to health. Our results demonstrate two important prerequisites for any health cue. First, we show that facial adiposity, or the perception of weight in the face, significantly predicts perceived health and attractiveness. Second, we show that perceived facial adiposity is significantly associated with measures of cardiovascular health and reported infections. Perceived facial adiposity, or a correlate thereof, is therefore an important and valid cue to health that should be included in future studies.

Seeing overweight adults as babies: Physical cues and implications for stigmatization

“…Although moderately chubby cheeks of adult faces are known to be optimally attractive (Coetzee et al ., 2009), and facial fatness may result in rounder and apparently larger and hence more babylike heads, an increase in fatness may also deform the face and reduce the resemblance with a baby face. For example, compared to other facial areas, the forehead of an obese individual may appear relatively less high due to a gradually disappearing chin and hence apparently larger lower facial area.…”

“…In particular, looking at overweight and obese individuals, one is normally exposed to variation in physical features such as skinfolds, flabbiness of fat tissue, curved forms, and skeletal muscles, as well as to body proportions that may be correlated with fatness such as relatively short and thick neck, relatively large head, apparently shorter legs, and a posture suggesting lack of balance; all aspects that, when not too extreme, could have both negative and positive emotional and motivational implications. That there is considerable room for positive appraisals is suggested by the frequently observed curvilinear relationships between judgements of attractiveness and BMI (Maisey, Vale, Cornelissen, & Tovée, 1999; Swami & Tovée, 2006; Tovée, Maisey, Emery, & Cornelissen, 1999) or facial adiposity (Coetzee, Perrett, & Stephen, 2009). The motivational relevance of different physical aspects could be overlooked, however, when only extremely obese exemplars are presented that appear severely deformed and handicapped due to their weight; schematic drawings, computer‐generated avatars, or body contours are used as stimuli; or research participants are merely asked to attribute different traits to the labels overweight or obese .…”

Face morphology: Can it tell us something about body weight and fat?

“…Banabilh et al in [13] carry out an accurate analysis of the face shape, using the 3D stereophotogrammetry, in order to detect patients more prone to severe form of sleep apnea; hence, although this study is one of the first investigating the relations between 3D accurate facial data and specific healthy/unhealthy condition, it cannot be properly compared to our study, nor with respect to the methodology neither to the objective. Other works (such as by Coetzee et al [8] and Tinlin et al [9]) aim to assess the health status focusing on body fat; on the contrary, they measure the perceived fat adiposity, hence they do not provide a reproducible measure for the assessment of the health status. Ferrario et al [30] consider the excess body fat in obese adolescents and the facial features studied are computed using 50landmarks manually located for each subject; while the measurements here proposed use only 4 facial landmarks, automatically labelled; also the target population is different.…”

“…We focus on the face, following the principles of medical semeiotics, which considers the face as a mirror of wellbeing [8,9,10]. The challenge is significant: though it is well known that the face is involved in the process of fat accumulation, there is no consensus in the literature about which are the facial morphological correlates of body weight and related indexes (Section 2.2).…”

Concordant preferences for actual height and facial cues to height

“…Male facial attractiveness has been found to positively correlate with body attractiveness (Fink, Taschner, Neave, Hugill, & Dane, 2010), and grip strength (Fink, Neave, & Seydel, 2007). Facial adiposity correlates with actual and perceived body mass index (BMI) (Coetzee, Chen, Perrett, & Stephen, 2010;Coetzee, Perrett, & Stephen, 2009), and altering facial adiposity in isolation affects facial attractiveness (Coetzee, Re, Perrett, Tiddeman, & Xiao, 2011;Re et al, 2011). Such findings indicate that some components of facial attractiveness may reflect preferences for body characteristics.…”