What’s the most common style essence?

Plus the surprising essences that may be rarest.

Are some of the seven style essences more common than others?

I’m unsure this question is very important—engaging premise—but I think I have a fun way to answer it.

Hard questions

The question is tricky because I mostly type celebrities, and famous people aren’t known for representing the average person. So even if a style essence seems most common among celebrities, that essence isn’t necessarily most common among laypeople.

I do type laypeople through virtual analysis, but I’m skeptical that the most common essence among my clients is the most common essence among the general population. For instance, it’s possible that people with certain style essences that aren’t as well-represented in modern fashion, such as Ethereal, are especially likely to seek a style analysis. If so, my percentage of Ethereal clients may surpass the percentage of Ethereals in the general population.

So based on who I typically type—celebrities and people who seek out style analysis services—it feels almost impossible to pinpoint the most common essences.

Experiment: Typing facial morphs

Fortunately, some researchers created facial morphs to show what the “average” female face looks like within many different countries. Each morph was created by averaging together the faces of many individual women within a single country to depict the average facial feature locations, shapes, and sizes of the women in that country:

Some of the facial morphs from the study—each country’s image is created by combining many different faces from that country. The morphs may look “average”, but if so, average is beautiful!

Why is this at all relevant?

Because it’s plausible that these morphed faces, created by averaging across many different faces, may reflect the most common style type—the type of the “average” person.

So instead of having to type hundreds or thousands of randomly-selected laypeople to determine the most common style essences, we might be able to type just a single facial morph to get our answer.

The most common style essence?

After typing a few of the morphs, I found that each one had the exact same dominant essence. Intriguingly, this essence is also the one I’ve anecdotally observed seems most common in the general population.

I chose to type the first face in each of the below picture sets—Chad/Cameroon, the Philippines, and Germany:

Part of my typing process is to use virtual draping: to compare faces back and forth between clothing styles that represent the pure essences to see which feels more harmonious. For example, we can compare the above faces to Natural vs. Romantic fashion:

Natural style.

Romantic style.

If you see what I see, you’ll see that the faces overall “feel” more harmonious with the Natural than Romantic outfit.

I’ll then repeat this process with the five remaining essences, which I won’t depict here for the sake of conciseness.

My result is that the three faces I virtually draped all were dominantly Natural. Meaning that we can (extremely tentatively) conclude that Natural is the most common essence.

The second (and third) most common style essences?

Are the faces above purely Natural? Based on my typing, no. I would say they all have a second essence, at least the three I formally typed: Gamine.

This also fits my anecdotal observation that Gamine appears to be a relatively common essence.

Further, I would say that all three faces I typed have a third essence: Classic.

Does this suggest that Classic is the third most common essence among laypeople?

Surprisingly, no! The problem is that whenever you average together a large number of faces, the Classic essence may emerge in the final averaged face, whether or not any of the original faces had Classic.

This is because when you average together a bunch of faces, the averaged face starts to look very, well, average—the spacing between the eyes, for example, and all the other features becomes very regular, not especially far apart or close together.

So while it’s possible Classic is the third most common essence, we probably can’t conclude that from typing averaged faces.

These faces appear to have generally similar proportions (i.e., distances between the features) to what we see on most faces.

Did the experiment work?

We might argue that something about the averaging process made the final averaged faces look Natural and Gamine even if those weren’t the most common essences of the individual women. For example, you could say that because Natural shapes tend to be larger, they obscured many of the smaller (say, Ingenue) shapes in the individual women.

This is definitely possible but seems somewhat unlikely. If it’s true that larger shapes (like Natural) became overrepresented in the averaged faces as a consequence of the averaging process, then we probably wouldn’t expect the final faces to have Gamine, a shortened essence.

But again, it’s definitely possible that something like this happened, and that Natural is not the most common essence. This post is meant to present a hypothesis rather than a definitive statement on which style essences are most common.

And you can totally argue that some of the many morphed faces I didn’t type may have had other significant essences.

Are the typings accurate?

You can also argue that my typings here are totally wrong.

Part of what I hate and love about style analysis is that it has a huge component of inherent subjectivity. It can be hard to provide any kind of objective evidence for why a person has a certain type.

One way to make typing somewhat more objective is to identify patterns between faces of the same type.

For instance, we can compare the above facial morphs to faces of Natural Classic Gamine celebrities to see if there’s a resemblance.

Natural Classic Gamine Elizabeth Banks seems to fit in pretty well with the Natural Classic Gamine morphs:

But this comparison process isn’t foolproof. For one, no guarantee that we all agree on Elizabeth Banks’s typing.

Also, people who share the same style type often don’t share a strong literal resemblance. This is due to a variety of reasons, including that people with the same style type can have very different coloring, and that people with the same style type can have very different ratios of the essences.

Amber Tamblyn (left) and Miranda Cosgrove (right) I’ve typed as Natural Classic Gamine, but I think the NCG facial morphs have a higher amount of Natural than Amber and Miranda. And Amber and Miranda may have a higher amount of Gamine. Plus the hair and eye colors are quite different, making it even harder to see a resemblance.

Overall, though, I still think Amber and Miranda harmonize well with the facial morphs, despite that the literal resemblance feels unimpressive. I can look at their faces together with the morphs and experience physical and emotional feelings of calm and ease.

Typing faces can be thought of as a highly physical, sensory process, where you let your body feel and sense harmony, sort of similar to how we can sense harmony or disharmony in music.

Is it bad to have “common” or “uncommon” style essences?

No! As the facial morphs and Natural Classic Gamine celebrities illustrate, faces with “common” essences are beautiful.

There’s also lots of research suggesting that people tend to be attracted to people who look familiar. And there’s a very well-documented psychological principle, the “mere exposure effect,” revealing that people tend to like all kinds of things they find familiar. Looking familiar has some clear benefits.

That said, modern American culture sometimes seems to highly value less common style essences, as evidenced by the prevalence of the Dramatic style essence among fashion models. But of course that doesn’t make those faces objectively more (or less) attractive.

Having a more popular face does not equate to having a more beautiful face.

Downsides of generic beauty advice

The fact that Natural and Gamine may be the most common style essences has implications for beauty advice, especially if it comes from a scientist.

For example, some scientific studies will manipulate faces to have eyebrows of different thicknesses, or different makeup styles, or different positions of a given feature, and ask study participants which faces are most attractive. Then, based on study participants’ preferences, the scientists might conclude that the best-looking eyebrows for all women begin approximately 2 millimeters from the tops of the eyes or something.

One problem with this conclusion is that different style essences may appear harmonious in different eyebrow styles. So if most of the faces in the study were Natural Gamine, then study participants’ preferences may reflect the most harmonious eyebrows for Natural Gamines. But if you’re a Romantic Ethereal Ingenue, your most harmonious eyebrows may be the ones that the study participants turned up their noses at.

Generic beauty advice doesn’t tend to suit everyone, which is why I love that style analysis considers our unique looks.

The rarest style essences?

This is highly speculative, but based on observation, I would guess that Romantic and Ingenue are the rarest essences. Romantic may be a bit rarer than Ingenue.

Neither essence is rare in the sense of being extremely uncommon—many, many, many celebrities and laypeople have one or both—but if I had to pick the essences that seem least prevalent overall, these would be the two. Future posts may speculate more on this.