Can you be too beautiful? It is hardly a problem that most of us have to contemplate – as much as we might like to dream that it were the case.

Yet the blessings and curses of beauty have been a long-standing interest in psychology. Do those blessed with symmetrical features and a striking figure live in a cloud of appreciation – or does it sometimes pay to be plain?

Combing through decades of findings, social psychologists Lisa Slattery Walker and Tonya Frevert at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte have reviewed all the evidence to date – and their conclusions are not what you might expect.

At the most superficial level, beauty might be thought to carry a kind of halo around it; we see that someone has one good attribute, and by association, our subconscious assumes that they have been blessed in other departments too. “It’s one of many status characteristics that we can identify very early in our interactions,” says Walker.