Attractive men got 19.9% of employers to call back. Men who sent no photo got 9.2%. Six studies, one honest sceptic, three real objections — and what the controllable half costs to fix.
In 2015 two economists sent 5,312 CVs to 2,656 Israeli job openings. The CVs were identical
except for the photograph. Men whose application carried an attractive headshot got a callback 19.9% of
the time. Plain headshot, 13.7%. No photograph at all, 9.2%.
That is a big number and it is the kind of number this genre loves. It is also not the finding that
should change what you do, because you cannot change your face.
The finding that should change what you do is duller and better. When researchers separate innate
attractiveness from grooming — how neat, clean and put-together someone looks, which is a different
variable and a controllable one — grooming accounts for roughly half the earnings effect for men.
For women it accounts for all of it.
So the question is not whether good-looking people earn more. It is whether the part you control is
doing any of the work. The honest answer, with the sceptics given their say, takes about fifteen minutes.
We are not going to sell you a routine at the end of it and pretend that is a salary negotiation.
The Foundation, and How It Is Usually Misquoted
Daniel Hamermesh and Jeff Biddle established the field in 1994 in the American Economic
Review. Working from three survey datasets, they reported that men with below-average looks earned
about 9% less than average, while above-average men earned about 5% more. For women the figures were
roughly 5% and 4%.
Read those numbers again, because the popular version has them backwards. The penalty for plainness
was larger for men than for women. This study gets cited constantly as evidence that women are
judged more harshly on appearance in the labour market, and on its own data, that is not what it found.
Hamermesh later put a lifetime figure on it in his 2011 book Beauty Pays: about $230,000
over a career. It is worth knowing how that was built, because nobody who quotes it ever says. He
assumed $20 an hour, 2,000 hours a year, over 40 years — $1.6 million — and applied an
estimated 10–15% gap. It is a back-of-envelope illustration, not a measurement. Treat it as one.
The 1994 study also has weaknesses its authors acknowledged: the data are cross-sectional, so they
cannot establish causation, and they control for neither intelligence, personality nor health. Hold onto
that. Someone is about to do exactly that and the result is not comfortable.
The Study That Actually Matters Here
Jaclyn Wong and Andrew Penner, writing in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility in
2016, did the thing the earlier literature had not. Working with roughly 14,000 respondents in the
National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, they used interviewer ratings on two separate
five-point scales — one for physical attractiveness, one for grooming.
Splitting those apart changes the picture. For women, the earnings premium attached to physical
attractiveness disappeared once grooming was controlled for — all of the measured effect was
grooming. For men, grooming accounted for roughly half.
Penner’s own summary is the useful sentence: what matters is not your innate attractiveness but
how you present yourself.
Half is not everything. But half of a documented effect, sitting in the one variable that responds to
a $16 bottle and ten minutes a day, is the most actionable finding in this entire literature.
Why It Pays, Which Is Not What You Would Guess
Markus Mobius and Tanya Rosenblat built an experimental labour market in 2006 to work out the
mechanism, and published it in the American Economic Review. They could isolate channels by
varying what employers saw and heard.
About 15 to 20% of the premium ran through confidence — attractive people estimated their own
ability higher and negotiated accordingly. About 40% ran through visual stereotyping, employers simply
expecting more of a face they liked. And about 40% ran through oral communication, with attractive people
rated as better communicators on audio alone, where nobody could see them.
That last channel is the strange one and it is worth sitting with. A third of the effect showed up
when appearance was invisible. Some of that is confidence audible in a voice. Some of it is that people
who have been treated well their whole lives talk like it.
The Case That It Is All an Illusion
Now the uncomfortable part, and we would rather print it than let you find it somewhere else.
Satoshi Kanazawa and Mary Still, in the Journal of Business and Psychology in 2018, took the
same Add Health data and added the controls the 1994 paper lacked: health, intelligence, and the Big Five
personality traits. The beauty premium disappeared.
Their reading is that attractive people earn more because they are healthier, more intelligent, more
conscientious, more extraverted and less neurotic — and that appearance was standing in for those
things all along. They also surfaced something everyone else had smoothed over: respondents rated
very unattractive consistently out-earned merely unattractive ones, sometimes out-earning
average and attractive people too. Earlier work had collapsed those two categories together and hidden it.
A premium that is not monotonic is not much of a premium.
There are three further objections and all three are fair. Reverse causality: high
earners can afford dermatology, orthodontics, tailoring and a trainer, so the arrow may point the other
way. Rater bias: an interviewer scoring someone as attractive may be reading charisma or
articulacy and writing it down as looks. Class proxy: “well groomed” is a
socioeconomic marker, and the premium may be a reward for signalling membership rather than for
appearance itself.
Take all of that seriously and the beauty premium becomes genuinely uncertain. Here is what we think
survives it. The grooming result is the part of the structure that holds up best, because grooming is the
variable least confounded with the things Kanazawa and Still controlled for — your IQ does not
change when you start washing your face, and neither does your health. And the class-proxy objection,
if anything, argues for paying attention to grooming rather than against it. If tidiness is
read as a class signal, that is a signal available for about $180.
What the Research Says Is Controllable
Three findings, none of them about a product, that between them tell you where to spend.
Judgments form in 100 milliseconds. Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov showed in
Psychological Science in 2006 that a tenth of a second is enough to form trait judgments of
trustworthiness and competence from a face, and that longer exposure raises people’s confidence in
those judgments without changing them. You are not being assessed over the course of a meeting. You are
being assessed on the way in and then confirmed.
Removing a problem beats adding polish. This is the most useful thing on this page.
Bastian Jaeger and colleagues, in Perception in 2018, tested skin blemishes and skin smoothness
as separate variables. Blemishes lowered rated trustworthiness, competence, maturity, attractiveness and
health. Smoothness raised attractiveness and health. But the effects were not symmetrical: the negative
effect of blemished skin was significantly larger than the positive effect of smoothed skin, and in their
second study the benefit of smoothness fell by 46.8% when blemishes were also present. Fixing what is
visibly wrong is worth more than improving what is already fine. That is a spending instruction and it is
the opposite of how the grooming industry is priced.
Facial hair is a lever, and it points up. Sarah Mittal and David Silvera, in the
Journal of Business Research in 2021, ran five studies on sales and service personnel. Bearded
staff were rated higher on expertise and trustworthiness than clean-shaven, stubbled or moustached
counterparts — consistently, across industries, and independent of the person’s race or
attractiveness. They also ran it live: a Facebook advertisement featuring the bearded salesperson returned
a 2.66% click-through rate against industry benchmarks of 0.71% and 1.04%. That is a real-money result
from a real ad account, which is rare in this literature.
The Arithmetic, Stated Honestly
Six products below address the levers the research names: visible skin problems, visible ageing,
visible flakes, facial-hair neatness and odour. They come to $178.78, of which $89.99 is a shaver that
should last three years. Call it $120 a year once you are running.
Against Hamermesh and Biddle’s 9% figure on a $70,000 salary, the gap between below-average and
average is $6,300 a year. Against Wong and Penner’s finding that roughly half of the male effect is
grooming, the controllable portion is around $3,150.
Now the caveat, and it is not a formality. No study has shown that buying these products moves
anyone between rating bands, and none of this is evidence that a routine produces a raise. The
research identifies grooming as a variable that correlates with earnings and is under your control. It
does not price the intervention. Anyone who tells you a $40 serum has a calculable return on a salary is
doing arithmetic the literature does not support.
What the numbers do establish is the shape of the bet. The controllable half of a contested effect
costs about ten dollars a month to address. Even at a steep discount for every objection above, that is
not a close call.
Scores here rate how well the published evidence supports the lever, not the product’s cosmetic performance. They are anchored to the top item and step down 0.2. Every figure on this page traces to a named study.
What We Deliberately Left Out
No cologne. The evidence that scent affects earnings or hiring outcomes is thin to non-existent, and
we are not going to smuggle a $200 bottle onto a page about research findings because it is the most
profitable thing we could put here. Wear what you like; that decision belongs in our
cologne ranking, not this one.
No teeth. Dental appearance almost certainly matters — it shows up in the perception literature
repeatedly — but we could not find an effect size we were willing to print, and whitening strips
are not a grooming purchase we would make on this evidence. If your teeth are the visibly wrong thing,
a dentist is a better use of $180 than everything below combined. That is the Jaeger principle applied
honestly rather than conveniently.
No hair-loss treatment. Minoxidil and finasteride are drugs with real effects and real side-effect
profiles, and the decision to take one is not an appearance-ROI calculation. Our
hair growth serum ranking covers the over-the-counter end of
that category on its own terms.
Two Sentences of Advice
Fix what is visibly wrong before you improve what is already fine — that is Jaeger, and it is
the whole of the practical finding. Then stop, because the returns past that point are not measured by
anybody and the industry selling them knows it.
Where This Sits in a Routine
If this page persuaded you that visible skin problems are where the money is, the two rankings that
follow from it are facial cleansers and
face sunscreen — the second does more for how your face ages
than anything else you can buy. If the facial-hair finding is the one that landed, our
electric shaver ranking and
beard oil ranking cover both directions of that decision. And if you
would rather spend nothing until you know what to avoid, our
deodorant and
shampoo ingredient guides are free and will save you more
than this page will earn you.
Do attractive people actually earn more?
The classic finding says yes — Hamermesh and Biddle (1994) reported a 9% earnings penalty for below-average-looking men and a 5% premium for above-average, with slightly smaller figures for women. But the finding is contested. Kanazawa and Still (2018) reanalysed similar data adding controls for health, intelligence and Big Five personality traits, and the premium disappeared entirely. They also found that people rated very unattractive consistently out-earned merely unattractive ones, which is not a pattern a straightforward beauty premium would produce. The honest answer is that it is disputed.
Does grooming matter more than looks?
For women, on the best available evidence, grooming is the entire measured effect. Wong and Penner (2016), using roughly 14,000 respondents from the Add Health study with separate interviewer ratings for attractiveness and grooming, found the attractiveness premium for women disappeared once grooming was controlled for. For men, grooming accounted for roughly half. That matters because grooming is a controllable variable and bone structure is not — and because grooming is less confounded with health and intelligence than attractiveness is, it is the part of the finding most likely to survive the sceptics.
How fast do people judge your appearance?
About a tenth of a second. Willis and Todorov (2006), in Psychological Science, found that 100 milliseconds of exposure to a face was enough to form judgments of trustworthiness, competence, likeability, attractiveness and aggressiveness that correlated highly with judgments made with unlimited time. Extending exposure to 500 or 1,000 milliseconds increased people’s confidence in their judgment without meaningfully changing it. In practice, the assessment happens as you walk in and the rest of the meeting confirms it.
Is it better to fix a skin problem or improve good skin?
Fix the problem, and the asymmetry is measured. Jaeger and colleagues (2018), in Perception, tested skin blemishes and smoothness as separate variables and found blemishes reduced rated trustworthiness, competence, maturity, attractiveness and health — while the negative effect of blemished skin was significantly larger than the positive effect of smoothed skin. In their second study the benefit of smoothness dropped by 46.8% when blemishes were present. Subtractive grooming beats additive grooming, which is the reverse of how the industry prices its products.
Should I grow a beard for work?
The evidence in customer-facing roles points that way. Mittal and Silvera (2021), across five studies published in the Journal of Business Research, found bearded sales and service personnel were rated higher on expertise and trustworthiness than clean-shaven, stubbled or moustached counterparts, consistently across industries and independent of race or attractiveness. They also ran a live Facebook advertisement where the bearded salesperson returned a 2.66% click-through rate against industry benchmarks of 0.71% and 1.04%. The finding is about a neat beard, not an unmanaged one.
Will buying a grooming routine increase my salary?
No study has shown that, and we are not going to imply it. What the research establishes is that grooming correlates with earnings and is the controllable portion of a broader appearance effect — roughly half of it for men. Nobody has run an experiment where people adopted a routine and their earnings were tracked, so the intervention itself is unpriced. What you can say is that the levers the research names cost roughly $180 to address, and that is a small bet against a contested but repeatedly measured effect.
