AI Insight
This study examined how cosmetic makeup affects social judgments of faces across Chinese and British observers. Makeup consistently increased perceived attractiveness and youthfulness across both cultural groups, but its effects on trustworthiness, competence, and dominance varied significantly depending on the observer's nationality and the ethnicity of the face being judged. Chinese participants rated lightly made-up faces as most trustworthy, while British participants showed no trustworthiness differences across makeup conditions.
Why it matters
The findings reveal that makeup functions as a culturally-dependent social signal beyond simple beauty enhancement, influencing perceptions of competence, status, and trust differently across societies. This has practical implications for cross-cultural professional settings, marketing strategies, and understanding how appearance modifications shape social judgments in diverse cultural contexts.
Understand the Science
IntroductionHuman observers rapidly infer socially relevant traits from faces, yet these judgments can be altered by appearance modifications such as cosmetic enhancement. It remains unclear whether cosmetic enhancement produces similar effects across different dimensions of facial evaluation and whether these effects are interpreted consistently across cultural contexts. The present study examined how cosmetic enhancement influences facial social evaluation among Chinese and British perceivers.MethodsIn a preregistered mixed-design experiment, 100 Chinese participants and 99 British participants evaluated East Asian and Caucasian female faces presented in natural, light-makeup, or heavy-makeup conditions. Participants rated each face on attractiveness, dominance, competence, youthfulness, and trustworthiness.ResultsCosmetic enhancement increased perceived attractiveness and youthfulness and also enhanced competence and dominance overall. However, several effects varied according to perceiver nationality and target ethnicity. Trustworthiness showed a particularly context-dependent pattern. Chinese participants rated lightly made-up faces as more trustworthy than natural or heavily made-up faces, whereas British participants showed no significant differences in trustworthiness across makeup conditions. Additional interactions indicated that the effects of cosmetic enhancement on dominance, competence, and youthfulness also depended on the combination of perceiver nationality and target ethnicity.DiscussionThese findings suggest that makeup-induced appearance cues can operate as social signals in facial impression formation. Cosmetic enhancement produced relatively general benefits for beauty- and vitality-related impressions, whereas its effects on status-, agency-, and trust-related judgments were more dependent on makeup intensity and the cultural and intergroup context in which the face was evaluated.