A host of studies show that, though being physically unattractive is not a legally protected category in most jurisdictions, it is the basis for a lot of discrimination. Studies, for instance, have found that when grade school teachers are shown academic records for a child, they rate the child's ability and intelligence more highly if the picture attached to the records is of a cute child than if it's a homely one.
Similar effects are found in the workplace:
Biddle and Hamermesh's 1994 study showed that the 9 percent of working men who were rated by interviewers as either "homely" or "below average" in physical appearance also received 9 percent less than average in terms of hourly earnings. By contrast, the 32 percent of men who were rated "above average" or "handsome" by interviewers earned 5 percent more than the average for men in the sample. Interestingly, the study showed that women, although also rewarded and penalized for their looks, were not penalized at the same level as the men. The most attractive women earned only a 4 percent premium, whereas the least attractive 8 percent of women in the workforce suffered only a 5 percent penalty.
In a second study published in 1998, Biddle and Hamermesh focused their attention on lawyers graduating from a "selective" but unidentified law school. In the law school study, panels of individuals were shown pictures taken of students at the time they matriculated to the law school and asked to rate them on a five-point scale. When the ratings given to the male students in the 1970's age cohort were graphed, it was found that, one year after graduation, a difference of two standard-deviations in a student's appearance was worth a 3 percent increase in salary. Five years after graduation, the same difference was worth a 10 percent increase and, after a lawyer became established in his profession, the difference was worth 12 percent. After fifteen years of practicing law, each increase of one standard deviation in a lawyer's appearance was worth $3,200 for lawyers in the public sector and $10,200 for lawyers in private practice.
Daniel Hamermesh, one of the authors of those studies, is back out with more work on looks discrimination, and drawing at least one truly absurd conclusion:
Another scintillating point argued by Hamermesh is that while women often bear the brunt of looks bias in the mating arena, men are more affected by looks discrimination in the professional world, since their gender still comprises the majority of the working population.
“Most men will work, regardless of their looks. Women still have some choice about whether to work for pay,” says Hamermesh. “If a woman is bad-looking and she knows she will be penalized in the workplace, she will be less likely to work.”
Saying that women have choice about working for pay is staggeringly blind to the reality that many women do in fact have to work as increasingly families require two incomes to make ends meet—never mind that if unattractive women don't do well romantically due to their looks, they will have to work to support themselves. That's not even touching the fact that saying "oh, well, you're ugly but at least you can just stay home and avoid the issue" is...dickish is the first word that springs to mind.
Jill Filipovic has some important rejoinders to Hamermesh's blind dickishness, including that:
“Beauty discrimination against women has been enshrined into law in a way it hasn’t been with men,” says Filipovic. “Women can be fired for not wearing makeup, not being thin enough, or not wearing revealing enough clothing.”
Studies have also found that women face a wage penalty for being obese while men do not. People of color also often face discrimination in which looks are a factor, either blatantly as in the Abercrombie & Fitch case or more subtly but still pervasively:
A number of researchers have independently found that, when people are asked to rate an individual's attractiveness, their responses are quite consistent, even across race, sex, age, class and cultural background. Facial symmetry and unblemished skin are universally admired. Men get a bump for height, women are favored if they have hourglass figures, and racial minorities get points for light skin color, European facial characteristics and conventionally "white" hairstyles.
Gender presentation can also have enormous effects, of course.
But while there's compelling evidence that people are treated differently according to their looks from early childhood, that gender and race play heavily in how they are judged and treated, and that this has concrete effects on how they do in school and on the job, I want to argue that the overlapping but not identical categories of class and money also play a role in how appearances are judged. That role certainly increases as people get older, but it's not absent in childhood. For instance, my mother, who was from a more middle-class background than many of her classmates, tells a story of being taken around to other classrooms in her elementary school as an example of appropriate dress and hairstyle for a little girl. That strongly suggests that, whatever her raw physical appearance, the class culture according to which she was dressed drew positive attention from teachers.
But these effects grow massively as we get older. Braces do less than nothing to enhance your appearance during the time you have them, but if you need them and don't get them, crooked teeth are with you for life. They are considered to detract from appearance intrinsically, but also are a visible signifier that you didn't have the dental care you needed. Visible cavities or missing teeth have the same dual effect. By the time you're an adult, these things are naturalized: You're no longer the kid who should have had braces and isn't it a shame he didn't, you're just a person with bad teeth.
That feeds into something I hold to be true: Even without resorting to plastic surgery, being able to spend money on appearance can bring the vast majority of people up to having what we might think of as average or acceptable looks, because when we make casual initial judgments of people's looks, we don't just register facial symmetry or lack thereof, but the enormous number of things with which we surround our faces. Clothes and hair and skin and body type and the aforementioned teeth all matter, and they are all massively affected by both the amount of money we have to spend and the class culture that informs our decisions about how to look.
So, as we've established, if you're middle class, it's overwhelmingly likely you had orthodontia if your teeth were uneven. Your cavities have been filled and you have all your teeth. With obesity linked to class, your weight is more likely to fall into the culturally desirable or acceptable range. Your skin tone benefits from good nutrition even if you don't get facials or wear a lot of makeup—but if you have a skin problem, you can go to a dermatologist or get a facial or cover it up with high-quality makeup (if you're a woman, anyway). You get regular haircuts that involve more than slapping a bowl on your head and trimming around the edges, and have access to natural-looking hair coloring if you want it. Your clothes fit and are in good condition, and your wardrobe contains clothes for any occasion you have to attend—or you can buy something new to ensure that you show up at a job interview or a business dinner or a party dressed so that you appear appropriate and respectful.
These things make a huge difference. At the outer range, the investment of a lot of money in physical appearance can turn a somewhat homely person into one who, at least on first glance, is attractive. If the first glance reveals perfectly coiffed hair; smooth skin; white, even teeth; and fantastic clothes on a sculpted body, most observers mentally categorize that person as attractive without giving the second and third look that reveal an off-kilter nose and eyes set too close together. Or whatever.
Now think about what attributes are likely to place you in the eight or nine percent of people whose unattractiveness leads to lower pay, as cited above. Bad teeth definitely rank, as do skin problems—not just acne or a rash, but skin grayed from exhaustion, or dulled by poor nutrition. Clothes that don't fit or are visibly worn may suggest you don't care about being up to standard at your job and may accentuate aspects of your body shape that are held to be undesirable. And your body shape itself is affected by nutrition, by whether you are able to pay for a gym membership, by whether you have time or energy to work out after working two jobs.
In short, the vast majority of people in the middle class and above have the option of having an appearance that is, at first blush at least, average and acceptable. For working-class and poor people who are on the bubble—who start off somewhere between homely and average—that option probably doesn't exist. It's another injury of class that is all too often invisible in a country that works hard to deny the existence of class even as its inequalities grow by leaps and bounds.
