Does one of these pictures look more attractive to you? Read on to find out why.

Often marketing people will spend a lot of time and money getting the right person associated with their product.

Although the science behind why this is important is relatively recent, it doesn’t take a genius to know that it is better to put your product in the hand of someone attractive.

It’s not just that we’re instinctively drawn towards attractive people, the associations our unconscious mind makes between the product we’re seeing and the context we’re seeing it in changes the way we feel about that product.

However much we like to tell ourselves we’re objective about these sorts of things, we usually aren’t.

If your product is related to health then how healthy a person looks is even more important; it just wouldn’t make sense to sell your exercise programme with a picture of someone looking unhealthy on the cover!

Researchers have investigated what constitutes a healthy look by asking participants in a study to manipulate the skin colour of male and female Caucasian people in photographs.

They found that people chose to increase the rosiness, yellowness and brightness of the skin.

From previous work they know that people with more blood and oxygen colour in their skins look healthier. Skin that is slightly flushed in this way is indicative of a healthier heart and lungs.

Conversely, people with heart disease or who smoke have fewer blood vessels in their skin and therefore have a less rosy complexion.

So when it comes to selecting a model to promote your product, or adjusting the image in Photoshop, you’ll do better if you aim for a picture closer to the one on the left, than the one on the right.

Source:  Springer (2009, November 16). Skin color gives clues to health.