I’m recently single, and being a nerd I brought my OKCupid profile out of its dormant state to hopefully meet likeminded women. I looked at my old photos and thought, “I should take a new one.”

But what kind of photo? I decided to put it to the test and conduct a survey to find the most attractive picture of myself.

Setup

First I had to decide on my search dimensions. I settled on:

With / Without glasses

Facing forward / side

Smiling / Not smiling

Facial hair style (full beard, shaved neck, shaven)

This ends up being 24 combinations. Todd was kind enough to help me set up a photo-taking station complete with umbrella lighting and a DSLR. He realized this was going to take awhile, handed me a remote shutter controller, and left me to take my photos.

Testing

About 90 minutes and 24 photos later I had all my pictures. I had originally thought I’d need to create my own survey and use something like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk but then I found PhotoFeeler, a website dedicated to this kind of thing.

For each photo I gathered 40 votes from females up to age 37 along three dimensions — intelligence, trustworthiness, and attractiveness.

Results

After $157 spent and I had the 24 x 40 = 960 votes in, I decided to do some aggregations.

What effect did glasses have on these dimensions?

Turns out, people with glasses look more intelligent! Who knew?

What about where I was looking?

This one was totally surprising to me because it contradicts OKCupid’s data on the same subject. At least for me, it doesn’t appear to make much of a difference. In the one case it did, attractiveness, looking to the side had a negative impact, something OKCupid suggests will have a positive effect.

Next up: smiling

Ah! Another contradiction of OKCupid data. Smiling was the tested factor with the largest impact by far.

Lastly, facial hair.

There have been a few studies regarding beardedness and perceived trustworthiness and attractiveness, but I expected getting rid of my neckbeard to help, not hurt. Maybe I’ll be a true Software Engineer and keep it.

Potential Confounding Factors

When taking photos for 90 minutes and smiling about half the time, my face muscles definitely got tired. Despite my best efforts, I suspect my smile was a bit less genuine and attractive as time went on. My facial hair was the factor that changed the fewest times, so it’s a good proxy for time. This could explain the decline in attractiveness with reducing facial hair.

Conclusion

Some of the results were surprising, but in the end I’m back where I started, with my default look: Glasses, smiling and a beard. Wish me luck!