Beauty products promise us smoother skin and bigger eyes, but attraction runs far deeper than looks.

Attraction begins before we ever say a word: a relaxed, unhurried presence is what really draws people in.

In conversation, it’s kindness and responsiveness that make us more attractive.

Consumer culture hurries us away from ease and kindness, but a few simple practices can bring us back.

It happens to all of us now and then, and it happened to me just a few days ago while strolling through Ljubljana, Slovenia, dressed in my casual American attire and passing a long line of people whose style seemed impeccable. Suddenly, I felt it: Unattractive. The next morning, things got worse: I awoke to find a shiny red pimple had sprouted overnight on the left side of my nose. (How does that even happen?)

It doesn’t take much for us to start doubting our looks because everywhere we turn—TikTok, Instagram, billboards—we see people with smooth skin, big eyes, small noses, slim frames, and the whispered (sometimes shouted) message is, You should look like them. Then comes consumer culture’s promise: And you can, if you buy__. It’s billions of dollars riding on us believing that it’s all just one small purchase away.

But page after page of research on attraction tells us things consumer culture would rather we never knew because what consumer culture can do is sell us products promising smoother skin, brighter eyes, smaller noses, slimmer frames, and it can convince us that the latest bottle will finally close the gap between our face and the one on the packaging; but what consumer culture can’t do is bottle and sell what science tells us about true attractiveness.

Let’s get this out of the way first. Do the Hollywood good looks these products promote matter? Yes, they do, but far less than consumer culture would have us believe. At first blush, we tend to find faces attractive when they’re symmetrical rather than unusual (with no pimple on the left side of their nose) (Little and colleagues, 2007; Rhodes, 2006). But pouring our energy into winning at this surface game is a poor investment because more lasting measures of attractiveness lie elsewhere (Hunt........

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