My love is like a red red nose (#2)

Another Kiwi and I were enjoying a pint of Gleamhound's Bloodpressure Plummet [may contain plums] at the Old Entomologist when we were appraised of the new research from Pazda et al. (2016) and Thorstenson et al. (2016), about pairing up the most red-faced men and women so as to selectively breed a sexy new human subspecies with apoplexic complections [or possibly vice versa]. This will enliven the supermodel career path and will be good news for suppliers of natural vermilion-based face-raddle. Naturally we dropped everything and headed to the laboratory to replicate their findings, NO WAIT we had more beer.

Apparently redder faces are sexier; also healthier-looking, more intelligent and more honest. Indeed, it is a mystery how the human race managed to reproduce back in the days of my childhood before colour photography, when everyone was black-&-white.

Note the sex-appeal

Let us pass discreetly over the possibility that exaggerated colour contrast in photographs and digital media have left us expecting a heightened level of colour saturation, and that it was increased saturation that turned the cranks for Pazda's and Thorstenson's subjects, rather than ruddiness as such.

Staircase procedure: Doin it rong

One wonders whether these studies are compatible with the earlier report that facial yellowness is what makes for pulchritude... especially yellow tones in the skin of otherwise-albino Scotspeople, such as might result from the natural food pigments in an atypically-healthy and un-Scottish fruit-n-vegetable diet.

Arguably, a flaw in that study was its reliance on a staircase procedure to measure sensitivity to yellowness, which assumed that Yellow=Sexy and by design could not detect preference for pallor instead.


No wait! Last author on the Yellow=Sexy study was Dave Perrett... who was also last author on both Red=Sexy studies. Perhaps he should compromise and investigate the allure of Orange. Perhaps he was right both times, and a future dynasty of orange-hued elective overlords will trace their descent back to the King in Yellow and the Queen in Red. "House of Orange" joke goes here.

Doubleplus Unsexy

This time Perrett has crossed the Rubicund and teamed up with Thorstenson, Padza and Elliot, who previously came into the Riddled purview with their discovery that a vaguely sad emotion disrupted one's colour perception (in a study with such egregiously bad methods, statistics and interpretation that it was retracted within weeks rather than the customary years). It is not clear what the new super-group will call themselves -- I humbly put forward "Pigments of the Imagination" as a band-name -- before they go on tour, performing cover versions of such classics as "Before the Kiss (A Red-Cap)" and "Rudolf the Red-faced Reindeer".

I am not entirely sure what a "purview" is, but I imagine it to be a variety of bay window.

[Thx Neuroskeptic]