Does wearing a mask in Japan make you less attractive?

People in Japan like to wear masks, especially in the flu and hayfever seasons.

Does it make a woman look more mysterious, hiding half a face? Or is she spoiling her charming looks?

We know of a Japanese woman whose face we have never fully seen because she is always wearing a face mask. However, what we can see is always stunning, so the mask is both frustrating and tantalizing.

Apparently this is a question serious enough for academics to do research over.

Folk from the University of Hokkaido and Nagoya’s Chukyo University set out to find out if wearing a mask made you less attractive to the opposite sex.

Junichiro Kawahara, associate professor at Hokkaido University’s Graduate School of Letters, and Chukyo University psychology professor Yuki Miyazaki have released the preliminary results from their joint research project. In the study, the pair began by photographing 66 men and 66 women, all between the ages of 20 and 39. Each person was photographed twice, once wearing a white surgical mask, and once without. The pictures were then shown to two different groups of survey respondents (with 29 men and women looking at the women’s photos and 26 men and women looking at the men’s) who rated how attractive they thought the people in the photos were, on a scale from one to one hundred.

When the responses were compiled, Kawahara and Miyazaki found notably lower evaluations for the photos of people wearing masks. The average score for females without masks was 49.1, compared to 44.7 for those wearing masks. The gap was even more pronounced between the highest-ranking maskless and masked women, who respectively received 65.4 and 56.5 points.

While not as severe, similar disparities were observed among the evaluations of the male photos, for which the average maskless score was 41.7 versus the masked average of 39. The top-ranking maskless male earned 56.5 points, while the number-one masked man came away with just 51.6.

Well, we’re not sure about their findings. After all, what about the Japanese porn fetish for masked women? And idol groups like Kamen Joshi?

There are also many kinds of surgical masks, not to mention colors, so we personally think the variables are too big for any kind of sweeping statement.