Effect of Tattoos on Perceived Attractiveness

Ball and Elsner (2017) indicate that the presence of a tattoo does not necessarily detract from a woman’s attractiveness. Photographs of 16 women and 14 men of varying degrees of attractiveness were presented twice: once without a tattoo and once with a tattoo that was photoshopped on, via a slideshow to five female and four male observers at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. We asked observers to rate how attractive each model was overall as well as how attractive each model seemed to be socially, professionally, and romantically. Male and female observers saw female models as being more attractive on all of these dimensions, but their ratings of these dimensions for the male and female models interacted significantly, F(1.826, 12.78) = 7.718, p = .007. Follow-up analyses revealed that male observers’ ratings of the male and female models re. these dimensions did not interact and were less varied than those of female observers, whose judgments of the male and female models were not only more disparate but also interacted significantly across the different dimensions of attractiveness, F(1.424, 4.272) = 10.451, p = .026. Interestingly, female observers assigned lower attractiveness ratings than male observers to the male models and assigned higher attractiveness ratings than male observers to the female models.https://digitalcommons.snc.edu/collaborative_presentations/1009/thumbnail.jp