Men, too, in the case of women

May 14, 2007 09:11 GMT  ·  By

There is a wide spread concept that women tend to neglect a man's physical appearance and to concentrate only at his abilities. That's why guys like Austin Powers and their "Mojo" would cause quite a stir.

But for body builders and sports addicted, a new study comes with bad news.

It seems that the opposite sex is much more attracted to your face (in case you've got one) than your curved biceps, round a*s and huge back, especially if you're a male.

These are the conclusions of the first research monitoring the importance of faces and bodies building to someone's sex appeal, made by a team from the University of Western Australia in Crawley led by Marianne Peters.

The trial involved 12 women and 12 men who had to mark the attractiveness of persons seen in photographs, on a scale of 1 to 7. Some subjects could see the entire person, others just faces and some just bodies.

The face-only and body-only ratings allowed the researchers to see how they could determine the sex-appeal of an "entire person". They discovered that faces presented a significantly much higher variation for ratings than bodies did; thus they were more important for the subjects.

In the case of women rating men's sex appeal, 52 % of the attractiveness was scored by the face rating, while bodies counted with just 24 %.

A similar situation was found in the case of men rating women' sex appeal: 47 % of a woman's overall beauty was scored by her face and 32 % by her body.

"That women focus especially on the face because they are better at picking up emotional cues which are key to partner suitability." said Peters.

Sorry, guys, you cannot hide a Woody Allen face, a platypus brain or wood-chopper manners behind the steroid pumped flesh.