Find out how the size of your pupils can make you more attractive!

To seduce, the look is an undeniable asset. But more than their colors, it would be another parameter that affects our attractiveness: the size of our pupils!

The ideal technique to catch his eye…

Led by the team of Zachary Estes, professor of marketing at Bayes Business School, a new study looked at how pupil size influences our judgment of beauty.

The researchers conducted six experiments to test the effects of pupil size on attractiveness. The pupil is the black circle in the center of the eye, and the iris is the colored ring around it. The researchers showed nearly 3,000 participants portraits and images of blue or brown eyes of men and women. The images were edited so that one version showed the eyes with constricted pupils and another version showed the eyes with dilated pupils.

Color less important than iris size

Participants were then asked to rate the attractiveness of the faces in the photographs. The study found that faces were rated as more attractive with smaller pupils, which are consistent with larger irises.

The experiments also tested whether participants found faces with large irises more attractive because they were more colorful or because they made the eyes appear brighter. The results were the same when participants rated black-and-white images of people with dilated and constricted pupils, proving that the effect is not due to iris color.

To increase your sex appeal, it’s the size (of the iris) that counts

The results therefore reveal that faces with dilated pupils would be systematically judged more attractive. Professor Zachary Estes declared:Our research shows that people appear more attractive when their irises are larger, which makes their eyes look brighter.“.

Co-author Dr Martina Cossu from the University of Amsterdam concludes: “In the Renaissance, women applied belladonna drops to increase pupil dilation and appear more attractive. Nearly 400 years later, our study shows that they were unaware that bright eyes with constricted pupils appear more attractive than dilated ones.“.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder…

The researchers do not put forward a hypothesis to explain their results. These results may even appear counterintuitive knowing that pupil dilation is a reflex that can be triggered by physiological factors, such as excitement and attraction. Which could have signaled to our interlocutor that we are interested and therefore increase our “attractiveness”…

This finding could have implications in various fields, including marketing, where faces used in advertisements could be modified to include slightly dilated pupils, thus increasing the perceived attractiveness of the models. In psychology, these results help to better understand the mechanisms of attraction and nonverbal communication.