do you ever look at someone's face like mine and think gay obviously having a gayar is a thing that people talk about but can you tell just from looking at somebody's face like if you take away the voice clothing and other context clues and literally just focus on the face would you know is gay face a real thing early research in 2011 found that self-identified homosexual men had more symmetrical faces than straight men but these studies were small and didn't take into consideration grooming techniques I mean us gay guys we like to pluck our eyebrows
keep our beards nice and trim I struggle with both of those things actually also I know a lot of gay men who have Botox and filler trying to make their faces symmetrical so in 2015 researchers started using morphometric software which is basically a quantitative analysis of form or physical features you know like actually measuring distances and angles and then using math and they found that gay men had shorter noses and larger foreheads compared to their straight counterparts research on lesbian faces found that on average the lesbians in the study had more upturned noses and smaller
foreheads than their straight counterparts interestingly having a gay male face wasn't just a matter of being more feminine when judged by independent Raiders so a gay man could still have a very masculine looking face but also be considered to have a gayl looking face and vice versa for lesbians but perhaps my favorite and most hilarious research took these results even further they basically took a bunch of pictures of people's faces stripped them of any accessories makeup and even hair and then exaggerated their features to differing degrees in order to make them look more or less
quintessentially gay based on the previous findings then they asked a group of volunteers to guess if the images were of gay or straight people and no word of a lie the rating scores almost perfectly fit a linear regression model meaning the more exaggerated the gay features were the more likely the volunteers were to think that that person was gay based on their face alone this suggests that having a gay face is more of a Continuum rather than being categorical so it's not that you either have one or you don't but that there's a scale from
slight gay face to full-blown gay face but even without using modified photos it turns out that some people are better at identifying gay faces than others one study found that women are better than men at identifying the sexuality of a man or woman based solely on their face in fact women were actually particularly good at guessing if a man was gay based on their face alone they did it with 75% accuracy this is consistent with some earlier research about how women are better than men at facial processing the research also found that the less prejudiced
someone was towards gay people the more accurate they were at identifying gay faces and not so surprisingly gay and lesbian individuals often had higher rates of accuracy than heterosexual individuals at guessing gay faces then in 2021 with the help of AI processing systems things started to get wild in the world of gay face studies researchers fed an AI system 35,000 images from dating sites of both gay and straight faces and the AI was able to accurately guess if a person was gay or straight based solely on their face shape with 81% accuracy for men and
74% accuracy for women this study also found that gay men's faces had larger foreheads and narrower Jaws gay female faces had smaller foreheads and larger Jaws compared to straight women but why would gay people have different facial structures in the first place the truth is we don't know for sure but scientists suggest that some biological factors such as exposure to certain levels of sex hormones could subtly influence the facial structure differently in men and women and at the same time their sexual orientation of course it's important to note that nearly all of this research uses
binary concepts of both sexual orientation and gender when we know lots of people fall into different places on the spectrum of life and of course it's worth bringing up the genuine concern and critiques that this type for research can bring up the risk of reinforcing harmful stereotypes their issue with privacy and whether this is going to like be technology that's weaponized against us queer people and of course gay people can have straight faces straight people can have gay faces this is just research that's describing some Trends so while it's of course interesting to learn about
the biology of being gay it's also important to be sensitive about this research as well scanning people's faces and then sorting them into gay or straight seems like a dystopian movie that I do not really need to be a part of but what about gay voice can can you tell someone's gay just from the way that they sound we actually have a whole episode breaking down the science of gay voice on our side note podcast Channel which I'll link to on screen here or in the description below or if you prefer just the audio podcast
you can see it on Spotify apple or wherever you listen just search side note podcast by ASAP science you can hear more of our gay voices with our gay faces talking about more gay science thanks for watching this video make sure you like And subscribe okay and uh we'll see you ASAP AO for some new science Uso poo true
