Picture yourself scrolling through an online store, hunting for a jacket. You land on a photo, feel a spark of interest, and click “add to cart.” You believe you are judging the jacket. But how much of that spark came from the person wearing it? Could an appealing face be nudging your opinion of the fabric, the cut, and the color without your ever noticing?
A set of four studies published in the British Journal of Psychology offers evidence that this happens more than we might expect. The researchers describe what they call a “model effect,” in which the facial attractiveness of a person wearing a garment tends to raise how positively viewers rate the garment itself.
A question that had been studied backward
Plenty of research has looked at how clothing shapes our impressions of the person wearing it. Think of the assumptions we make about someone in a sharp suit versus someone in sweatpants. But Young-Jin Hur and Bunyaporn Burechittinanta of the Fashion Business School at the University of the Arts London, who are listed as joint first authors, noticed that the reverse question had rarely been tested. Does the wearer shape our judgment of the clothing?
Their reasoning rests on two well-documented patterns in psychology. First, human faces grab our visual attention automatically, and attractive faces seem to grab it even more readily, often without our awareness. Second, there is a long-studied pattern called the “attractiveness halo effect,” sometimes summarized as the “what is beautiful is good” idea. People tend to attribute positive qualities, from intelligence to trustworthiness, to physically attractive individuals. The authors reasoned that this glow might spill over onto objects sitting next to an attractive face, such as the clothes a model is wearing.
Testing the effect with dresses and faces
The first study recruited 54 participants who each rated a series of images on a pleasantness scale from 1 to 7. Some images showed faces alone, some showed dresses alone, and some showed composite images combining a face and a dress. The faces came from the Chicago Face Database, a standardized collection of photographs, and were chosen to span a range of attractiveness levels. The dresses varied in color, red or black, and in length, short or long.
A design detail here matters. Rather than relying on preset attractiveness scores, the researchers used each participant’s own ratings of the individual faces and dresses to predict how that same person rated the combined image. This let them measure how much a viewer’s personal reaction to a face fed into their reaction to the whole picture.
The results showed that both the appeal of the dress and the appeal of the face positively predicted ratings of the composite image. In this first study, the two influences were roughly equal in strength. The color and length of the dresses, on their own, had no reliable effect on how pleasant people found them.
Telling people to focus on the clothes
One obvious objection is that participants in the first study were asked to rate the overall “look,” which invites them to consider the face. So the second study, with 180 participants, changed the instructions. This time people were explicitly asked to rate the pleasantness of the dress specifically, not the whole image.
The model effect held, though it weakened. The dress’s own appeal now carried about three and a half times the weight of the face’s appeal in predicting the rating. The face still mattered, just less than before. The authors interpret this pattern as a sign that focusing attention on the garment can shrink the influence of the face, but it does not erase it.
This study also tested whether personal history with dresses changed the effect. Participants reported how much they enjoy wearing dresses, how many they own, and how often they wear them. None of these measures altered the model effect. Whether someone was a devoted dress-wearer or rarely touched them, the face still nudged their evaluations.
Listening to people think out loud
The third study stepped away from controlled ratings and into conversation. In one-on-one interviews, 30 participants viewed images of models in dresses and described their experience moment by moment, saying where they were looking and what they were thinking. Afterward, they were asked directly whether they thought a model’s face influenced their opinion of a dress.
The researchers coded the transcripts for whether each person spontaneously mentioned the face, and whether they said the face played a role. Around 13 percent brought up the face on their own while describing each image, and 23 percent said the face mattered when asked directly. Both figures were higher than would be expected if faces played no role at all. At the same time, most participants did not spontaneously mention the face, which fits the idea that the effect often operates below conscious awareness.
Widening the net
The earlier studies used dresses worn by White female models with composite images stitched together digitally. The fourth study aimed for something closer to what people actually encounter online. The team gathered 72 real photographs from brand marketing and platforms like Pinterest, featuring models who varied in gender, ethnicity, and age, wearing a broad range of everyday clothing rather than only dresses. The 161 participants, recruited through the survey platform Prolific and including both men and women, rated whole images, faces, and garments.
Again, both the garment and the face positively predicted ratings of the whole image, with the garment carrying more weight, about five and a half times that of the face. This study also measured general engagement with fashion using an established fashion orientation scale. People with higher fashion interest leaned more heavily on the garment when judging an image. But the influence of the face itself stayed steady across people with different levels of fashion involvement.
What it might mean, and what it doesn’t
For anyone in marketing, advertising, or fashion, the studies suggest that the choice of model can quietly steer how consumers judge a product. The authors note this is not a simple lever to pull, though. The research did not try to define what an attractive face looks like, and in fact the second study found that participants’ own attractiveness ratings did not match the standardized scores from the face database. The authors point to earlier work suggesting that individual taste accounts for roughly half the variation in judgments of facial attractiveness, so the practical assumption should be that beauty varies from viewer to viewer rather than following one universal standard.
The authors also raise an ethical point. Advertising does not only reflect ideas about attractiveness; it may help shape them, potentially placing psychological pressure on people who do not fit idealized images.
Some caveats are worth keeping in mind. The images were static, front-facing, and emotionally neutral, so the findings may not capture how movement, posture, or expression change things. The studies relied on self-reported ratings rather than direct measures like eye-tracking, which the authors suggest could better trace how and when attention lands on a model’s face. And the term “female participants” reflected self-reported gender rather than a separate measure of sex assigned at birth or gender identity, a distinction the authors flag for future research.
Still, across four studies using different methods, samples, and stimuli, the pattern kept reappearing. The researchers interpret this as evidence that our judgments of everyday objects are not shaped by the object alone. A human face nearby, especially an appealing one, tends to leave its mark.
