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Psychologists: Sexual orientation can be determined by facial features
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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Psychologists have found that representatives of sexual minorities can be distinguished from people of traditional orientation by their faces: “straight” people have more symmetrical faces than homosexuals and lesbians.
Psychologists from Albright College (USA) decided to find out whether it is possible to determine a person's sexual orientation by their appearance. Of course, we are not talking about anecdotally effeminate men and equally masculine women. The goal was to correlate sexual orientation with a person's facial features and how others perceive them.
The experiment involved 40 people (15 men and 25 women) who were shown a series of 60 photographs, half of whom were strictly "straight" and the other half were homosexuals or lesbians. The subjects had to rate each photo on a five-point scale, where one corresponded to "prefers only men", two - "looks at women", three - "bisexual", four - "mostly women, but occasionally men", and finally, five - "only women".
In their work, the scientists relied on the results according to which sexual self-esteem correlates with facial symmetry: heterosexual men had more symmetrical facial features than homosexuals. During the experiment, it turned out that symmetrical male faces were associated with heterosexual orientation by the evaluators. A similar dependence was noted among women, but the results were statistically much less reliable.
Naturally, psychologists in their physiognomic exercises took into account the influence of feminine appearance: after all, certain (“feminine”) facial features in a man can suggest that their owner has non-standard sexual preferences. And, of course, this factor played a role: a man with a masculine appearance had a greater chance of receiving a heterosexual assessment. However, as the authors emphasize in the Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, masculinity or femininity of appearance still played a much smaller role than symmetry or asymmetry of features.
It should be emphasized that the authors do not discuss the reasons why sexual minorities have less symmetrical faces (or why some people think that their faces are asymmetrical). Psychologists only talk about some kind of evolutionary adaptation that allows you to avoid making a catastrophic mistake when choosing a partner. Cases of homosexuality also occur in the wild, so it is not surprising that evolution has had enough time to teach humans to distinguish between “us” and “them” in this sense.
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