Why there aren’t “masculine” and “feminine” style essences, part 2: a rigorous experiment

One of life’s big questions: is Ethereal Dramatic Natural Brad Pitt more feminine looking than Dramatic Natural Erin Wasson?

Some people call Dramatic, Natural, and Gamine the “masculine” essences, and Romantic, Ethereal, and Ingenue the “feminine” essences. If that perspective is correct, then Dramatic Natural Erin is by definition more facially masculine than Ethereal Dramatic Natural Brad.

So let’s test that idea with an (allegedly) impartial judge: a website that uses face recognition technology to rate how masculine vs. feminine different faces appear. Let’s see if a male face with a dominant “feminine” essence is rated as more feminine than a female face with only “masculine” essences.

Setting up the experiment

I chose Brad Pitt for the male face, because his looks definitely don’t get enough attention already. He’s also dominantly Ethereal, so he’s a good example of a male face with a lot of so-called femininity. His eyes and lips have a lot of Ethereal softness.

The female face: beautiful model Erin Wasson. She’s Dramatic Natural, and I’m confident she doesn’t have other significant essences.

The face recognition tool: a website called Pictriev that allows you to upload a face and uses face recognition to report how masculine vs. feminine that face appears. The site also identifies “look-alikes”: celebrity faces that appear most visually similar (in shapes, not colors) to the face you uploaded. I don’t recommend using this website, because it’s “not secure”—and there’s likely a less sketchy face recognition tool you could find—but I don’t think it’s given my computer a virus or anything so far.

So, let’s see if a Dramatic Natural female face is rated as more masculine than an Ethereal Dramatic Natural male face.

The results

Here are the results for Dramatic Natural Erin Wasson. (The photo I uploaded of Erin to the website for analysis is highlighted in yellow, and the website’s results are right below that.) If it’s true that Dramatic and Natural are “masculine” style essences, then she should get a high rating on the masculine scale.

But that’s the opposite of what happened. The tool rated Erin as appearing 98% feminine, 2% masculine. It was a few years off on her age, but ignoring that, the results seem fairly accurate.

Why? First, out of the thousands of possible celebrity faces, the tool accurately determined that she looks most similar to herself. (It makes sense that it’s not 100%, because any particular picture of ourselves isn’t identical to other pictures of ourselves, given differences in factors like the lighting, our face’s angle and expression, and the camera’s distance.)

Second, while I haven’t typed Kylie Bax or Eugenia Volodina, I’ve previously typed Rumer Willis as Dramatic Natural Ethereal and Bar Refaeli as Dramatic Natural Classic. So from a style analysis perspective, the tool did a decent job at detecting celebrities who visually resemble Dramatic Natural Erin. (Though Erin doesn’t have significant Ethereal or Classic, meaning we can’t use this tool to accurately type people.)

The point: the tool accurately determined that Erin resembles celebrities who also have a lot of Dramatic and Natural. Yet despite that it accurately recognized that she has high amounts of what some people deem “masculine” style essences, it rated her face as appearing 98% feminine.

On to Brad. He’s an Ethereal Dramatic Natural. So if it’s correct that Ethereal is a “feminine” essence, then he should score as more feminine than Dramatic Natural Erin: at least 99% feminine.

The result is the opposite. He’s 99% masculine. The tool again accurately discerned that he highly resembles himself, although it also discerned that he’s Pierce Brosnan. In fairness, I’ve previously made the mistake of finding a celebrity’s photo in an image search and misnaming that celebrity (because I assumed their name was in the article title when it was actually in the body of the article or something like that), and I’m guessing something similar happened here.

So this experiment isn’t going to get accepted into a prestigious scientific journal any time soon. But in my experience, the face recognition tool does generally rate male faces as more masculine looking, and female faces as more feminine looking. And that’s what it did for Erin and Brad, despite that Erin has what some deem a “masculine” style type.

Based on these results, and more seriously on these arguments, we can conclude that style essences very likely don’t determine how feminine or masculine a face appears.

Counterargument: an unfair comparison?

Some people might say it’s a flawed argument to compare women to men. They might say that Dramatic and Natural women look more masculine than more “yin” women, even if not compared to men.

But Erin was rated as 98% feminine—according to face recognition, she looks nearly as feminine as it gets. So the idea that Dramatic Natural women look significantly less feminine than other women isn’t supported.

What actually makes a face look feminine vs. masculine?

Style essences don’t directly correspond to femininity and masculinity—what does? Based on my limited understanding, hormones, especially those that increase during puberty, have a lot to do with this aspect of facial appearance.

Also based on my limited understanding, face recognition software works by “learning” what male faces generally look like, and what female faces generally look like. So male and female faces may have general differences in feature shapes and sizes, as well as differences in the distances between features. As just discussed, these differences don’t correlate highly enough with the style essences to make some style essences “masculine” and some “feminine.”

Arguably, those terms are also highly subjective—what ultimately makes a face masculine or feminine? Face recognition might be able to tell us which features generally characterize female vs. male faces, but we could argue that a face can appear masculine (or feminine) even if it doesn’t fit averages or stereotypes of masculine (or feminine) faces.

Are some style essences yin and some yang?

Finally, when some people apply the terms masculine and feminine to the types, they use the terms in a figurative rather than literal, biological sense. In this case, the terms “yang” and “yin” might be used. I’m more ambivalent about this type of characterization, because it’s more subjective. So it’s harder to say whether it’s right or wrong, valid or invalid. Some people may feel that those terms really help them conceptualize the essences, and I don’t think I can say that their perspective is inaccurate—there’s no face recognition software that will tell us how yin vs. yang a face is. The terms may be effectively used by acknowledging them as figurative rather than literal.

Personally, I don’t think I need the terms “yin” and “yang” to have an accurate and comprehensive understanding of the essences. Is Brad more “yin” than Erin? Is Erin more “yang” than Brad? Again, it’s subjective, but my personal answer would lean closer to no than yes.