does your face have high or low visual weight? So, let's talk about this concept, which has been making the rounds lately from art theory to human faces, and how this can actually apply in a practical sense. Understanding the visual weight of your face is key, as it impacts how you are perceived and whether or not certain cosmetic styles, grooming, cosmetic procedures will actually enhance or detract from the most salient features of your face. People needlessly overcomplicate the concept of visual weight when it's actually very simple once you know what to look for. You really can't unsee it. So, what is visual weight? Well, first we'll explain the concept behind visual weight in detail, and then we'll discuss the three factors that influence the visual weight of the face itself and touch on how you can increase or decrease the visual weight of certain areas of your face to enhance your attractiveness or create a particular aesthetic or a look. It's important to understand that visual weight is not synonymous with fat levels or muscle

mass. Instead, the concept deals with how people look at your face and where they focus most attention. Visual weight is a concept in visual art referring to the apparent heaviness of an object based on the amount of attention that it attracts. In simple terms, visual weight refers to how much a particular element draws your eye. If our eyes are drawn to an object, it is visually heavy. If our eyes are not, then that area is visually light. Artists understand the importance of visual weight to create balance in their artworks or to create an effect, and you can apply the same principle to your own face. When it comes to facial aesthetics, visual weight refers to the overall presence and prominence of your face's structure and your facial features. Do people naturally focus on particular areas of your face, or do they look at the overall harmony of the face instead? Hogarth explains this concept well in her book. Look at this image of a brick next to an image of a feather. We know the physical weight of a brick is much heavier than that of a feather, but as we

can see here, they're roughly the same size, and both attract our eyes' attention to the same degree, so their visual weight is actually equal. Now, let's make the feather bigger. Our eyes are drawn to the larger object, which is the feather, and so the feather has more visual weight. Now, let's make the brick bigger. This time, our eyes are drawn to the brick, and so it has a higher visual weight. Can you select the element that has the highest visual weight from this series of images? It's pretty obvious. So, the visual weight of an object is relative to other objects around it, and we can apply the same concept to facial features. Try to remember Mila Kunis's face from memory. What part of her face stands out the most in your mind? Her eyes, right? So, her eyes are big and stand out compared to her other features, which are much smaller, and your attention is naturally drawn to her eyes when you look at her face. So, she has the highest visual weight in this area. Her eyes are much more memorable than her nose, which just

Blends in with the rest of her face, and her eyes are more noticeable than her mouth, even though she's wearing attention-grabbing lipstick. The visual weight isn't just about the attention that we place on one facial feature relative to another. Your face as a whole can have high or low visual weight, or can fall somewhere in between. Let's look at how we can judge the overall visual weight of an image. Does this image have high or low visual weight? Your eyes naturally look at the image as a whole, and no part stands out and attracts our attention any more than any other part, so it has low visual weight. Compare that image a to this image B, and we don't look at image B as a whole. The difference in circle size and the uneven spacing draw the attention of our eye to specific parts of the image, so it has a higher visual weight weight than a. If we add this third image C to the comparison, it's immediately clear that it has even higher visual weight than B. Our eyes focus almost exclusively on two key

areas, which is the large red circle, and the other large circle with colorful patterns. Apply the same principle to the entirety of a face. Are your eyes naturally drawn to key striking parts of the face, or do they focus on the overall Harmony of the face, rather than any specific traits? Which approach do we typically take when we look at most faces? An eye tracking study found that people showed no General bias towards looking at the center of the face. Instead, looking first at distinct facial features. On the other hand, results from Hickman and colleagues show that visual fixations on well-balanced faces did not focus first on any single facial feature. These results together support the concept of both low and high visual weight faces. There appears to be a dual strategy for viewing Faces. Sometimes focusing in on a particular feature and other times taking in the entirety of the face. So, let's talk about the three main factors that influence the visual weight of the face. The first factor that influences the visual weight

is the prominence of your bone structure. Let's look at this example from Greg Albert's book. The rectangle on the left has solid coloring and harder edges that gives it an apparent density and makes it appear heavier relative to the rectangle on the right. The same concept of harsh versus blurred edges applies to the contours of your face. Let's compare Jennifer Goodwin's face to Kira Knightley's. Jennifer has a much rounder and softer face shape with little definition at the cheekbones or jaw, while Kira has much more definition that creates depth at her cheekbones and jawline. Her eyes are immediately drawn to the harsh contours of her bone structure, and this adds visual weight to her face. Because Jennifer's face is much rounder with no harsh edges, our eyes aren't drawn to her bone structure, and we take in the entirety of the face at once instead of focusing on a particular area like her cheekbones or the jawline. This low visual weight. Is it better to have high

or low visual weight then and which would be more attractive, and to be honest, one is not necessarily objectively better than the other, and no research seems to support this. However, a high visual weight is generally preferred in a western context, mostly because our beauty standards favor sharper and more defined bone structures. Survey research by professor in oral and maxillofacial surgery, Morris Murz, identified strong models square face shapes with developed jaw lines as the most attractive in their study, with the ideal jaw angle in profile view of around 130 for men and 125 for women, and the ideal bony to buccal zygomatic width ratios measuring at almost 1 to 1 for men and 0.83 for women. This closely corresponds to the face shapes of the most beautiful Western celebrities who have wider jaws and cheek bones compared to the general population, indicating that at least when it comes to the first back to their influences visual weight, the Liberties tend to have higher visual weight than average. On the other hand, a face can have high visual weight for the

wrong reasons. For example, Baker et's eye-tracking study found that when they face required dental aesthetic treatment, the mouth regions surpass the eyes in terms of visual attention. Compare our Western preferences to East Asian beauty standards where the ideal jaw angle for women is much smaller at 124°. For Chinese women, according to Ma's research, a Chinese survey also found 82% of participants prefer obtuse jaw angles on women, with a 50-50 preference between angular or obtuse jaw angles for men. This indicates a preference for a lower visual weight, especially for women's faces. And so, it's not a coincidence that many East Asian celebrities also have lower visual weight, having generally harmonious features with no particular feature that distinctly stands out. While we're on the topic of bone structure, it's also important to understand how treatments like fillers or surgery can alter visual weight. Let's look at Lea Michele's transformation as an example. And what do you notice about her face before? She already had strong, prominent facial features, so she had a high visual

weight naturally. If we look at her after pictures, it's highly likely that she had buccal fat removal, and this enhanced her visual weight even further to a point where there are too many parts of a face competing for your eyes' attention. Bea had less visual weight than Leo to begin with, so similar changes to bone structure did not have the same overwhelming impact on her look. In addition to fillers or surgery, makeup technique can emphasize or deemphasize your visual weight, where dark contour powder makes Jennifer's cheekbones appear more prominent, and this adds visual weight to the face. Keira Knightley's makeup artist for Pride and Prejudice rounded cheeks to reflect the beauty standards of the time, and this reduced the visual weight of her face to make it appear more seamless. Makeup techniques to highlight the eyes, lips, or nose can also alter the visual weight, and that brings us to the second factor that impacts visual weight overall, which is the prominence of the facial features. The placement and size of an object does

influence its visual weight. For example, the circle on the left is larger and closer to the bottom of the rectangle, so it appears heavier than the smaller circle on the right. The same principle applies to facial features. Let's use Kylie Jenner's face as an example. When she was younger, she had lower visual weight, and you'll notice the overall harmony of her face first, as she doesn't have any feature that draws emphasis in any particular direction. After cosmetic enhancements like lip fillers and cheek fillers, which did increase the size of her lips and cheeks, her visual weight became much higher. Her eyes are drawn to her more prominent individual features rather than the overall harmony of her face. Striking features draw attention to the eye, and this enhances visual weight, like bone structure prominence. Western beauty standards favor striking facial features that draw our attention, especially striking eyes, thick eyebrows, and large lips. If Lily Collins had thinner, less prominent eyebrows, it would impact her visual weight. Suddenly, we can see both her eye region and her face in general have lower weight. Although the

mouth and jawline, and Chin can carry higher visual weight on some faces visually. An object of a certain size, shape, or color will carry more weight when placed higher up. This is a well-observed phenomenon in the visual art literature, with Rudolph noting that if an artist wants two halves of an artwork to look alike, he or she must make the upper half shorter for balance. The application of this principle is all around us. Take a look at the number three on your keyboard, and you notice that the upper part is actually smaller than the bottom, but it doesn't appear so at first glance. This upper bias theory has been backed up by evidence where eye-tracking Studies by Assistant Professor Walton Namp confirmed that the upper half of a visual field has inherently greater visual weight than the lower half. What does this mean when it comes to facial features though? The upper half of our faces, mainly our eyes, are particularly important when it comes to visual weight, and again this is also reflected in eye-tracking studies. Three separate eye-tracking studies found that

in most cases, the eyes receive more visual attention than any other trait. What happens when you block off other parts of the face, like the jaw or the nose? Well, we can still recognize faces. What about when you block off the eyes? It's much harder to recognize a face with the eyes covered, suggesting we naturally place a lot of visual weight on the eyes. Just for facial recognition purposes alone, it's easy to increase the visual weight of the eyes and therefore your entire face using makeup. Naturally, larger eyes are more prominent, and research by Mor howow and colleagues reveal that eyeliner, mascara, and eyeshadow are effective at making the eyes appear larger. In general, smaller eyes hold less visual weight. The size isn't the only factor that influences the visual weight of facial features. The shape, placement, and color can also impact the visual weight of an object. For instance, male model Shao priz face has very characteristically defining features where his sharp facial controls add visual weight, but his eyes, though small, hold the most visual weight thanks to their complex shape and intense iris.

color. He has fairly prominent limbo rings, and this further enhances visual weight through contrast. Contrast is particularly important for women's faces, as Russell's 2003 study found that increased luminance enhances the attractiveness of women's faces, while the opposite is the case for men. A follow-up study from 2018 expanded on that research and found that the benefits of increased contrast for women are driven by the upper eye region. A wider Scara creates a natural contrast effect against the skin, and Pesik and colleagues suggest that dark limbo rings are attractive because they further enhance visual contrast in the eye area. In addition to making the eyes look bigger, Jones et al.'s research showed that mascara, eyeliner, and eyeshadow enhance the contrast of the eyes against the skin, and this also increases visual weight. Limbo rings are genetic, and they fade with age, but certain stars of colored contacts can actually fake the appearance of a more prominent limbo ring, increasing contrast and thus

increasing visual weight. Let's look about the spacing of your facial features next. Compactness, or the degree to which mass is concentrated around its center, reduces visual weight. Objects closer to the center appear visually heavier than objects at the periphery, and as such, the placement of features also influences perceived visual weight. This is why in general, smaller faces with bigger features have high visual weight, while bigger faces with smaller features have lower visual weight. Even though Halle Berry's face is small with medium-sized features, her wide-spaced eyes decrease the overall visual weight of her face, while Miley Cyrus's close-set eyes have the opposite effect. The third and final major factor that influences the visual weight of the face is the volume of the features. As 3D objects, our face naturally has volume, and the volume of each feature will actually impact the overall visual weight. What do you notice about the visual weight in Henry Ma's painting? Good art theorist Rudolph Arnheim notes that the volume of the pitcher and the plate makes them

appear heavier than the surrounding flatter object. Let's apply the same concept to faces. By looking at the volume of the features from the side profile, we also see the same. First, note that poor facial harmony from the side view can draw our eye to the out-of-proportion feature and thus enhance visual weight, but for the wrong reasons. In this case, profile balancing fillers in the chin will restore harmony and, as a result, reduce visual weight. This doesn't mean that lower visual weight side profiles are necessarily better, though. There are objectively attractive side profiles, that is, those that are dento-facially or orthodontically correct, can have higher visual weight. The nose is the obvious example of this, where less flat, taller noses can complement other features while still standing out and adding to the visual weight of the face. The volume of other facial features also matters. Look at this model's side profile where she clearly has low visual weight, and we take in all of the features all at once. But if you zoom out and include a chin, it's clear that the

prominence of the chin draws the eye and does add to the visual weight. Facial features have a major impact on the side profile, but how does your bone structure from the side profile impact your visual weight? As outlined in a 2016 study, strong gradients of color on a 3D shape enhanced visual weight, and the same applies to the shadows created by well-defined bone structures. While we generally attempt to enhance visual weight by increasing the size of our features from the front and defining our bone structure from both the front and side view, we typically favor less prominent facial features from the side, showing that Western beauty standards towards visual weight are actually not that clear-cut and tend to vary much more than say our standards for other things. If you'd like to learn more about your own PA, however, perhaps from our team of dentists, doctors, and aestheticians, head over to the coup's website to have a report commissioned and have us take a look and give you feedback based on your aesthetic characteristics and the guidelines of

research that we have to form an assessment. As always, I'll catch you all in the next one.

Why Is Everyone Talking About Visual Weight?

Taking a look into the age old question of what makes a face beautiful through anthropology and cognitive psychology.

Why Is Everyone Talking About Visual Weight?

Why Is Everyone Talking About Visual Weight?

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