MAKEUP’S IMPRESSIONS AREN’T JUST SKIN DEEP
Studies find women who don’t primp and preen risk losing income, writes Ana Swanson
For women, most of the attractiveness advantage comes from being well groomed.
Before 8 a.m., I have often already applied seven products to my face — face wash, tinted moisturizer, eyeliner, mascara and more.
And I don’t think I’m alone. In an effort to appear polished, many women spend a huge amount of time and money on makeup and skin care products.
You might dismiss all this female primping and preening as vanity or silliness. Yet a fascinating new paper from two sociologists suggests that women do have good reason to spend so much time and money on their appearance: If they don’t, they risk losing a substantial amount of money.
The research, from Jaclyn Wong of the University of Chicago and Andrew Penner of the University of California at Irvine, used data from a long-running national study of more than 14,000 people to look at the association between attractiveness and income.
Like past studies, the research showed that attractive people tended to earn higher salaries. But that wasn’t all. Their research suggested that grooming — practices such as applying makeup and styling hair and clothing — was actually what accounted for nearly all of the salary differences for women of varying attractiveness. For men, grooming didn’t make as much of a difference.
Numerous studies have shown that people who are considered physically attractive have many advantages in life. In school, attractive people tend to receive higher grades. In courtrooms, they receive shorter prison sentences. Research shows attractive people are more likely to be hired and promoted in the workplace, and end up with higher earnings.
Wong and Penner’s research supports some of these ideas. They find that, controlling for other differences such as age, race, class and education, individuals who were rated as more attractive by an interviewer earned about 20 per cent more than people who were rated as having just average attractiveness.
The researchers then broke down the results by gender, to investigate whether being attractive was associated with a bigger salary increase for women than for men. Conventional wisdom is often that appearances matter more for women, because beauty plays a big part in the traditional gender roles of a woman as a wife, sex object and bearer of children. Although women today have moved into other social roles, those traditional beauty ideals may have followed them there.
Wong and Penner don’t find any significant gender differences in the financial returns people receive for being considered attractive. They find that women earn less than men, and that unattractive people earn less than attractive people, but that attractiveness is not more or less important for women than for men.
However, the researchers did find a big difference between men’s and women’s salaries when it came to grooming. Controlling for factors such as age, race, education and personality traits like agreeableness and conscientiousness, they compared how interviewers rated people on attractiveness, how they rated the same person on grooming, and that person’s salary.
Wong says they wanted to look more closely at what being “attractive” really meant — is it something you are born with, or something you can acquire? After all, beauty can be an innate quality, or it could be the result of styling your hair well, wearing clothes that look nice on you, or perhaps experimenting with brow clay from Sephora.
They found that a substantial amount of attractiveness was the result of grooming, and here’s where they found gender differences, Wong says. “For women, most of the attractiveness advantage comes from being well groomed. For men, only about half of the effect of attractiveness is due to grooming.”
In other words, the study suggests that grooming is important for both men and women in the workplace, but particularly for women. Changes in grooming have a substantial effect on whether women are perceived as attractive, and their salaries. In fact, less attractive but more well-groomed women earned significantly more, on average, than attractive or very attractive women who weren’t considered well-groomed.
So what does this all mean? According to the researchers, the results suggest that beauty, especially for women, is more of a behaviour — “something you do,” rather than “something you are.” Most research and most people tend to see attractiveness as a fixed, innate trait, but the researchers say it’s more accurate to think of it as a combination of biological traits, personality characteristics and beauty practices.