In a recent viral YouTube video, two science educators have combed through the research around the phenomenon of the ‘gay face’ and found that gay people might actually have some facial characteristics in common. Unrelated, but they also probably share an ex or two.
The investigative video was created by biologist Mitch Moffit and science teacher Greg Brown, who — for those already drafting gay fan-fics — are also boyfriends. The pair scoured the available research into the gay face and highlighted key studies that have been conducted over the years.
In 2011, one study found that gay men had more symmetrical faces than their heterosexual counterparts (huge win for gay rights), but this study did not account for the grooming practices or cosmetic procedures more common among gay men.
That makes sense, since you’d be hard pressed to find a straight person who is even aware of the cardinal rule that eyebrows are sisters, not twins.
Another study in 2015 saw researchers use software to map the physical structure of faces, finding an underlying pattern that gay men had “shorter noses and larger foreheads” than their straight pals and lesbian women had “more upturned noses and smaller foreheads”.
Not since my own dissection of my dating app profile has this much scrutiny been placed on my face. This study was novel in that it found the gay face — or the ‘gayce’, since we love an abbreviation — was not tied to people rating the faces as either masculine or feminine looking.
Artificial intelligence got involved in the most recent study into the phenomenon, as researchers fed generators with 35,000 images from both gay and straight dating sites.
Possessing the same strong gaydar I feel whenever a barista serves me an iced latte (a true cliché), the AI was able to guess if a man was gay based on their face with 81 per cent accuracy, and if a woman was gay with with 74 per cent accuracy.
While the studies are useful for the next time I order that latte, they aren’t without controversy.
In response to the video, AI professor Dominic Lees told Metro that the research explored by Moffit and Brown is “not peer-reviewed”, and said most of it is based on generalisations that don’t account for all ethnicities.
Going a step further, cybersecurity expert James Bore said many of the studies around the gay face are considered “junk science” since we don’t yet have the data to confirm if it’s actually real.
“It’s superstition, and we do not have the data to say whether there’s anything to it or not,” Bore told Metro.
Perhaps the more important study would be why the face cards of the entire queer community never decline.
Lead image: Danielle Del Valle/Getty Images, Leon Bennett/Getty Images, Matt Jelonek/WireImage and Mike Marsland/WireImage
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