Women find men with facial scars attractive

London, November 17: Here’s something exciting for men dreading facial scars. A new study has found that scars increase men's attractiveness to a woman.
The research team from the universities of Liverpool and Stirling has found that even though women find men with scars on their face more attractive, they would not have a long-term relationship with them.

During the study, almost 220 people were asked to look at pictures of men and women, some of which had been manipulated to have different scars.

It showed that women, who were shown faces of men with and without different scars rated the scarred faces as better looking.

However, they did not enhance women's attractiveness to men.

"This is the first study to demonstrate that under certain circumstances post-traumatic scarring may increase a person's perceived social worth,” the Telegraph quoted researchers as saying.

"Our results suggest that under certain circumstances scars may advertise valued information about their bearers, and that the idea that scarring universally devalues social perceptions can no longer be assumed to be true," they added.

The scars that are rated attractive are those that appear to be associated with posttraumatic events or violence of some kind.

Although the researchers are not clear as to why women favour scars, they believe scarring associated with violence may signal to a woman that the man has a risk-taking personality or above average masculinity, which might appeal to women for short term relationships.

The study is published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.