Attractiveness Could Actually Make People's Faces <em>More</em> Forgettable

Do you remember what that really attractive woman you saw at the restaurant last night looks like? Or that good-looking man who walked past you on the street earlier today?

If their faces didn't have a particularly defining feature, chances are you don't, according to a new study in the journal Neuropsychologia.

The research shows that unless an attractive face has an especially distinctive feature -- like abnormally big eyes, or a uniquely shaped mouth -- you're a lot less likely to remember it than you are a more unattractive face.

"Until now we assumed that it was generally easier to memorize faces, which are being perceived as attractive -- just because we prefer looking at beautiful faces," study researcher Dr. Holger Wiese, of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany, said in a statement. But the new findings suggest this just isn't true.

Researchers had study participants look at a number of photos of faces that were all similarly distinctive -- half of the faces were considered "more attractive," and the other half were considered "less attractive." The participants were only allowed to look at each photo for a few seconds. Later, the participants were shown photos of faces and were asked if they recognized any of them.

The study participants were more likely to correctly recognize the photos of the less attractive faces, than the photos of the attractive ones.

They also found that the "more attractive" photos produced more false positives in the study participants, in that they were more likely to say that they recognized a photo of an attractive person when they really hadn't seen that photo before.