The average British person says the people they see in their daily lives are a third attractive, half alright and 16% ugly
According to economists, physically attractive women and men earn more than plainer-looking ones, with looks having a bigger impact on wages than even education. But while this can be established fairly reliably, how can we tell how many people are actually good looking?
A new YouGov survey asks British people to estimate what percentage of the people they see out and about in their daily lives are attractive, and what percentage are not.
Taken as an average of all the responses, British people feel as though a third (34%) of the people they are surrounded by are attractive – 8% drop dead gorgeous, 26% attractive but not supremely so.
The average British person says most of the people (52%) they see are alright – neither attractive nor unattractive – while 16% are ugly.
The survey might also reveals a degree of modesty regarding British people and their own looks, as more people (68%) say they are alright looking than feel surrounded by alright looking people.
Londoners are slightly more likely to say they are attractive (31%) than people from the rest of Britain (24% in the South; 23% in the Midlands/Wales; 26% in the North and Scotland).
According to separate research, attractiveness is more of an advantage to men than women when it comes to earnings. "Beauty can be a double-edged sword for women”, the research says, "Some people still believe good looks and intelligence are incompatible in women so a good-looking woman can't be that productive, but there's no dumb-blonde syndrome affecting men's pay."
Image: Getty
