Pillar · 5 min
Appeal
The pillar nobody else scores: colouring, the impression your face makes on a stranger, and how far it sits from the ordinary.
Every competitor measures proportion and definition. Appeal is the one we added, and it is the part of a face that the other four pillars keep missing: two faces can be geometrically near-identical and land completely differently on a person.
It is a composite, not a single reading — which is why it has its own report with three chapters in it.
| Part | Share | What it is |
|---|---|---|
The appeal pool | ≈ ⅗ | Colouring, contrast and inner harmony — the sixteen reads closest to what people mean by "striking" |
Physiognomy | ≈ ³⁄₁₀ | The impression a stranger forms in the first second: dominance, warmth, maturity |
Deviation | ≈ ¹⁄₁₀ | How far the face sits from the population average — distinctiveness, in either direction |
Colouring
The largest share, and the least discussed anywhere in this space.
Contrast between the features and the skin, the eyes against the sclera, the brows against the forehead, the lips against the surrounding tissue. High facial contrast is one of the more robust findings in the perception literature, and it is almost entirely absent from how people talk about looksmaxxing — probably because it is hard to turn into a gym routine.
It is also one of the more actionable things here, which makes the silence around it stranger still.
Deviation
A small term measuring distance from the average face.
The average face is attractive — that is a real and replicated result. But faces that land highest with observers are usually not the average; they are a little away from it in a specific direction. Deviation is the term that stops a perfectly unremarkable face from scoring as though it were striking.