WHAT IS AVERAGE AND WHAT IS NOT AVERAGE ABOUT ATTRACTIVE FACES

We reported in this journal (Langlois & Roggman, 1990) findings showing that attractive faces are those that represent the mathematical average of faces in a population. These findings were intriguing because they provided a parsimonious definition of facial attractiveness and because they supported explanations of attractiveness from the point of view of both evolutionary and cognitive-prototype theory. Since our 1990 report, several alternative explanations of our findings have been offered. In this article, we show that none of these alternatives explains our results adequately.