Dating advice has convinced many of us that there’s a single, correct version of attractive. It pushes people toward extremes and then acts shocked when everyone ends up chasing the same narrow target.
A 2024 paper in PLOS One looked at one portion of that problem. Researchers asked heterosexual men and women to use interactive 3D head models to choose a few things: their own face shape, their ideal face shape, the ideal face shape for a short-term and long-term partner, and what they thought the opposite sex would prefer. The result was basically a mutual misunderstanding with cheekbones. The authors write that “Women overestimated the facial femininity that men prefer in a partner and men overestimated the facial masculinity that women prefer in a partner.”
That’s not the same as “everyone wants the same face.” The paper gets into how preferences vary and how people make trade-offs depending on context. Still, the consistent theme is projection. If you’ve internalized a story that “real” beauty means exaggerated femininity or masculinity, you may assume the other sex wants the max setting, too. Then you chase it. You edit yourself toward it. You stare at your reflection and keep moving the goalposts.
Why People Overestimate Their Own Attractiveness to the Opposite Sex
The study also links this misread to dissatisfaction with your own appearance. The authors report that “The discrepancy between own and ideal sexual dimorphism” covaried with misperception of what the opposite sex wants. In other words, believing the opposite sex wants an extreme version of femininity or masculinity can make your own appearance feel inadequate.
This helps explain why people can be convinced they’re “fixing” themselves while dating gets worse. You tweak features to appeal to a preference you guessed at, then wonder why it doesn’t land. Meanwhile, the other side is doing the same thing in the opposite direction, because, apparently, we’re a species that loves running in circles and calling it self-improvement.
Attraction is not a single universal target. People disagree. People vary. People like what they like. Your job is not to build a face for an imagined audience. Your job is to stop letting a made-up audience run your self-image.
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