Active study 022026 / Summer

Do freckles make you look more or less attractive?

Framing

A narrow question,

tested precisely

Freckles, scientifically known as ephelides, are small, flat, light-to-dark brown spots on the skin. They arise from a genetic predisposition and appear or darken with exposure to sunlight. Freckles typically appear on the face, arms, neck, and chest, and become more pigmented in summer.

Although freckles occur naturally, some people imitate them for aesthetic purposes, believing they enhance their appearance, while others prefer to hide their natural freckles.

To the best of our knowledge, no studies have focused exclusively on how freckles affect perceived facial attractiveness.

QOVES AI FRECKLE GENERATION

Using a large generative image model and a novel in-house approach, our AI researchers added freckles to 40 faces from the Face Research Lab London Set (DeBruine and Jones, CC-BY 4.0), matching each freckle's color to the person's own skin. This methodology allowed us to confine the freckles to an anatomically derived nose-and-cheek region while keeping the subjects' true skin tone, texture, and identity untouched.

Baseline

Original picture, no freckles

Manipulated

Same identity, freckles digitally added

These pictures were not used in the study, they are shown for illustrative purposes only.

Inside the experiment

What raters

actually see

Each group saw all 40 faces, but only one version of each: half with freckles, half without. Which faces were freckled was reversed between the groups, so every face was rated both ways across the study, while no participant ever saw the same person twice.

This means we compare two versions of the same person rather than comparing different people. Because every participant rated both freckled and unfreckled faces, differences in how generously people rate cancel out of the comparison, and the same is true for differences between the faces themselves.

Group A