Is Beauty All in Your Head?
Any time you are discussing the head, you have to deal with the face. While there are several chapters in this book that deal with specific components of the face, this one will talk about the face in more general terms in an attempt to answer the question “What makes someone attractive?”
First impressions are a powerful thing. Body language can help you put your best foot forward, but then there's also a little thing called physical attractiveness that factors into first meetings. You have little control over this factor because, speaking in general terms, there are some people who are empirically attractive and some people who aren't. As a society, people accept the terms of what makes a person beautiful — but what are those terms, exactly? Attractive people usually have a few things going for them: lack of confidence and may actually feed the belief that weak-chinned people have weak constitutions.
Their faces are symmetrical.
Their faces are without obvious flaws.
Their faces are relatively youthful-looking.
In addition, the size and shape of certain areas of the face determine how other people perceive each other. Small or short chins, for example, lead to general interpretations of shyness. But is this a chicken-or-the-egg-type situation? For instance, if people with weak chins can be viewed to be less attractive than their strong-chinned peers and are treated as such, then it's natural that they might also start to view themselves that way. Their body language will reflect their
When your head is angled downward, you appear to be lacking confidence, sad, shy, or depressed.
Just as unattractive people might express their lack of confidence through their body language, people who have always known they're gorgeous may feel superior to the common man. That attitude will be reflected in the way they carry themselves, and may in turn lead you to look for signs of arrogance in all beautiful people.
So beauty — or the lack of it — is another example of the filter through which people view each other's nonverbal cues. When you're evaluating the body language involved with the head's gestures, be aware that a person's appearance can make you see things that aren't there (you want to believe that that great-looking guy is really nice, so you look for signs of it in the way he angles his head, for example) or can make you miss things that are there (you don't pay much attention to your not-particularly-handsome neighbor … but if you did, you'd find that he's always tilting his head to the side, really listening to what other people say). Proceed with caution!
