[kurtosis]

I'm too lazy to look up the ref, but someone told me that the preference for average faces was actually an artifact of the averaging process. It turns out that averaging images of faces also makes the skin look a lot younger and smoother, and therefore more attractive.

[_delirium]

One way to test it would be to see if the median face, by some choice of metric, was also more attractive. The problem with other averaging methods, like simple pixel averaging, is that you can produce a result that is not actually particularly similar to any face anyone has. For example, if you had a population where everyone's face was highly asymmetric, but 50% in one direction and 50% in the other direction, the average would be a symmetric face that is completely atypical for the population.

[trout]

There also appears to be studies that say attractive faces are easier for the brain to process.

http://bit.ly/cdH8b