People are obsessed with trying to engineer attractiveness. Sometimes it’s a tweak. Sometimes it’s a major overhaul. Either way, the standard constantly changes, and you’re supposed to keep up. One research thread goes in a stranger direction, asking whether a simple facial ratio relates to sex drive.
Researchers focus on facial width-to-height ratio, or fWHR. It compares cheekbone width to the height of the upper face, and it’s straightforward to measure from photos, which makes it a popular tool in studies about attraction and behavior.
A 2018 paper in Archives of Sexual Behavior tackled the question directly. The researchers measured faces and surveyed two Canadian student samples, 145 undergrads in one study and 314 in another. In their abstract, they report that fWHR “positively predicted sex drive” in the first sample, and they describe a similar link in the second. The authors also report “no significant FWHR × sex interactions,” meaning the association appeared across men and women in those samples. They even ran an internal meta-analytic check across their studies and reported support for the overall relationship.
People With This Face Shape Apparently Have Higher Sex Drives
If that’s where the story ended, the headline would write itself: “Shorter, wider faces equal higher sex drive.” However, real research rarely gives you a clean little fortune cookie, and this topic definitely doesn’t.
Another 2018 paper, published in PLOS ONE, tested the same idea in a much larger sample focused on women. The researchers measured fWHR from face images of 754 women and compared it with Sexual Desire Inventory scores, including total desire and categories like dyadic and solitary desire. Their abstract reports “no significant correlations between fWHR and any of our measures of sexual desire.” That’s a direct conflict with the earlier student-sample results.
So what can you responsibly say? A couple of studies found an association between fWHR and self-reported sex drive in young adult samples. Another study found no association in a large sample of women. The neat “face shape equals libido” claim runs into inconsistency pretty quickly, and the research itself shows that.
There’s also a reality check that has nothing to do with stats. Sex drive changes all the time. Sleep, stress, mental health, medication, hormones, relationship quality, and plain old life exhaustion can raise it, lower it, or scramble it week to week. A face measurement can’t capture that, and it can’t replace an actual conversation.
If you want a useful conclusion, it’s this. fWHR is an interesting research question, not a reliable way to judge how badly someone wants to hook up. Your best tool remains the least glamorous one. Ask.
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