“Never judge a book by its cover,” so the saying goes. However, when it comes to attractiveness, it seems we judge one book by the entire library. A new study finds that how attractive a person is perceived to be may depend on the attractiveness of the company they hold.

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The study suggests the people we are with might influence how attractive we appear to others.

Study author Dr. Nicholas Furl, of the Department of Psychology at the Royal Holloway University of London in the United Kingdom, published his findings in the journal Psychological Science.

According to Dr. Furl, popular notion holds that a person’s attractiveness is steady. “If you saw a picture of George Clooney today, you would rate him as good looking as you would tomorrow,” he notes.

However, the new study challenges this widespread belief, showing that how attractive we appear to others can fluctuate, depending on the attractiveness of the other people we are with.

Dr. Furl reached his findings by asking a number of participants to look at numerous pictures of people’s faces and rate each of them for attractiveness.

Next, subjects were presented with the same faces, but they were placed next to pictures of faces they previously rated as less attractive – referred to as “distractor faces.”

Adding these distractor faces led the participants to rate the other faces as more attractive than in the previous experiment, Dr. Furl reports.

Participants were then presented with pictures of two attractive faces alongside one distractor face, before being asked to pick which faces they believed were most attractive.

According to Dr. Furl, the distractor face caused participants to be more critical of the attractive faces.

“The presence of a less attractive face does not just increase the attractiveness of a single person, but in a crowd could actually make us even more choosey!” says Dr. Furl.

“We found that the presence of a ‘distractor’ face makes differences between attractive people more obvious and that observers start to pull apart these differences, making them even more particular in their judgment.”

In essence, the findings suggest that if a person is with friends who are generally perceived as more attractive, that person may appear less attractive – which Dr. Furl says might be expected.

“It’s perhaps not too surprising that we are judged in relation to those around us. This is a trope often seen in teen movies and romantic comedies, where a character associates themselves with a less attractive friend to elevate their own dating stakes,” he notes.

Dr. Furl believes there are many more ways by which we judge a person’s attractiveness, and he plans to uncover these in future studies.

“Rightly or wrongly, the way people look has a profound impact on the way others perceive them. We live in a society obsessed with beauty and attractiveness, but how we measure and understand these concepts is still a gray area,” he says.

“There will certainly be more research in years to come on this complicated area of human interaction, and I am excited to see where this research takes us.”

Read about a study that suggests attractive men are more selfish.