Yesterday’s Urban Dictionary word of the day was “butter face,” defined as:

“n. A girl who is hot, except for her (but her, butter) face.”

Basically, it means a girl with a sexually attractive body but a less-attractive face. So of course I put the link to “butter face” definition in my Gchat away message with some grumbly comment about the obnoxiousness of the phrase.

But then a male friend IMed me to say, “Simmer down, that’s not sexist! ‘Butterface’ just means the same thing as calling a man ‘ugly.’” But really, it doesn’t! “Ugly” can apply to both men and women, but “butterface” labels a woman only by her appearance. Men are always going to assess women’s face, legs, ass, boobs—that’s just what healthy human sexual attraction is. But labeling her based on what he considers to be her worst feature is just mean and nasty. It’s crueler still because there is no male equivalent. 

A mother’s love is supposed to be unconditional, right? Well, that’s not what a new study released by the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital found. According to the small study of 27 volunteers, babies that are less attractive might not get as much attention from their mothers.

University of Rochester psychologists tested how different colors affected men’s attitudes towards women in five different experiments. In one, the color of a woman’s shirt was digitally changed from red to blue. The men were asked, “Imagine that you are going on a date with this person and have $100 in your wallet. How much would you be willing to spend on your date?” When the woman was wearing a red shirt, more men rated her attractive and sexually desirable, and they were more likely to take her out on an expensive date. So this is why Sarah Palin always wears a red suit… [LiveScience]

However, four scientists from Tel Aviv University think differently. They recently unveiled a new computer program that contains a “beautification engine,” which uses a mathematical formula to alter a face in a photograph to a theoretically more attractive version. According to the programmers, the program maintains an “unmistakable similarity” to the original. The software program is based on the responses of 68 German and Israeli men and women, age 25 to 40, who viewed photographs of white female and male faces and picked the most attractive ones. With this data and an algorithm involving 234 measurements between facial features, like the distance between eyes, scientists trained the computer to determine which distances were the most attractive for each individual face and choose the ideal closest to the original face. They have not developed a program that will be a “beauty estimator” for nonwhite racial and ethnic groups.

Have you ever been attracted to someone whom you only heard, but had not seen? Well it turns out that through our senses, we are able to judge a potential mate’s health and reproductive genetics—reflected in the symmetry of their body—via the sound of his/her voice. In a recent study, published in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, participants listened to recorded voices and rated the voices based on attractiveness according to nine characteristics, including approachability, intelligence, sexiness and warmth. The researchers found that men and women whose voices were deemed approachable, sexy and intelligent were the most attractive overall. And the voices rated the most attractive were from those whose bodies were the most symmetrical. But a sexy voice and symmetrical body have nothing to do with the attractiveness of a person’s face. And researchers are still unable to objectively quantify a “sexy voice.” [Tango]

Verena Von Pfetten writes on The Huffington Post that she’s not attracted to hot guys. She finds them attractive, but judges the book by its cover. “They’re trained from a young age to be (often) unjustifiably self-assured, to eschew personality and affability for cocksure confidence, and to generally treat people like the feudal system is alive and kickin’,” she says.

In a study of 93 couples who had been together an average of 14 years, researchers found that both men and women rated their significant other as more attractive than the significant other rated him or herself. “Whereas women typically believe that men prefer a female shape thinner and larger busted than men actually prefer, men falsely assume that women prefer a heavier, more muscular and larger chested male physique than women actually want,” researchers at Groningen University in the Netherlands said in their report, published in Body Image. Isn’t it nice to know that your guy thinks you’re way hotter than you think you are? Because you are awfully fabulous, even when you’re having a bad outfit day. [Daily Mail, U.K.]