On Saturday 06 Jun 2009 8:21:14 pm Kiran K Karthikeyan wrote: > The Illusion of Sex demonstrates that contrast is an important cue for > perceiving the sex of a face, with greater contrast appearing feminine, and > lesser contrast appearing masculine.
Beautiful image. But IMO the conclusions (above) are wrong. "feminine faces" have well defined characteristics. Fiddling with the contrast in this particular picture happens to have highlighted the feminine aspects more in one picture given the lighting used for the original image. "female characteristics" (In the context of what is shown in this picture) are: 1) More pigmentation/darkness around the eyes 2) More delicate eyebrows 3) On average a paler face The highlighting of the lips in the image on the left adds to the effect. Women tend to do exactly this to their faces to highlight their femininity and when we see a pale face with dark eyes and highlifghted full lips we think "woman" Men tend to have bigger noses, chins and more promounced ridges above the eyes. If the lighting had highlighted these features, increasing contrast would not have achieved this effect. Mere contrast alone is not a differentiator, shiv
