Researchers investigating preferences for women’s hair color failed to find evidence that rare hair colors are perceived as more attractive.
The researchers — Zinnia J. Janif, Robert C. Brooks and Barnaby J. Dixson — had previously found that men with beards were perceived as more attractive when beards were rarer. But their new study, published in Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, failed to find similar results for women’s hair color.
Globally, most women have naturally dark hair. A recent survey found that women with blond or red hair have more sexual partners on average than women with other hair colors, suggesting that these rarer hair colors are associated with attractiveness.
The researchers recruited 1,494 female and 658 male participants and had them rate women’s faces for attractiveness using an online program. The program showed portraits of female models with blond, brown or red hair, and was designed so that one of the hair colors appeared less frequently than the others.
Overall, men rated the female models with blond hair as most attractive, followed by women with brown hair. Women rated the female models with brown hair as most attractive, followed by women with blond hair. Both men and women rated the female models with red hair as the least attractive.
But the rarity of the hair color had no effect on its perceived attractiveness.
“In the present study we tested whether experimentally manipulating the frequency of hair colors influenced the attractiveness of rare female hair colors. Overall, we found no evidence of negative frequency-dependence in men or women’s preferences for women’s hair color,” Janif and her colleagues said.
The researchers said they might have failed to find any result because they did a poor job of manipulating rarity.
“This is not to say that rarity has no influence on male face preferences. Our methods for familiarizing participants using 18 images in which some hair colors were common may simply not have been sufficient to generate the perception of rarity in other hair colors.”
The researchers also said that digitally manipulating the hair colors of the female models might have thrown off the results by creating unnatural looking features.
“Eyebrow color, eye color, and skin complexion all vary with hair color,” they explained. “Thus, naturally occurring red hair is typically associated with lighter skin, freckles, and possibly lighter eyebrows, whereas skin complexion is typically more melanic among people with darker hair. As such, manipulating hair color alone as we did in our stimuli may have created a mismatch between other facial traits and hair color.”
