Dating during the COVID-19 pandemic just became mildly more exciting.
Striding up to greet someone for the first time with half your face obscured, doesn't exactly fill you with meet-cute confidence.
But a new study by British academics suggests that protective face masks can make you more attractive — particularly the blue surgical kind.
Seven months after masks became mandatary in the United Kingdom, researchers at Cardiff University were curious to know whether the pandemic had altered perceptions of attractiveness.
Cardiff University school of psychology's Michael Lewis, the study's co-author and an expert in the psychology of faces, spoke about the findings after the pandemic began.
"Research carried out before the pandemic found medical face masks reduce attractiveness," Dr Lewis said.
"So, we wanted to test whether this had changed since face coverings became ubiquitous and [to] understand whether the type of mask had any effect."
The study — published in the peer-reviewed journal Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications — asked 43 women to rate the attractiveness of 40 male faces, with and without different types of masks and coverings.
Dr Lewis said they were surprised by the results, which indicated an overall sentiment of mask positivity.
"Our study suggests faces are considered most attractive when covered by medical face masks," he said.
In their pre-pandemic research, participants had said they associated masks with disease and would avoid people who wore them.
But the research conducted in February 2021 — which will be continued to see if the results are true for both genders — also found that faces were considered significantly more attractive when covered by cloth masks than when not covered at all.
"The current research shows the pandemic has changed our psychology in how we perceive the wearers of masks," Dr Lewis said.
The association of 'symbols and attractiveness'
Another similar study, conducted by Japanese researchers, suggested that women's faces were considered more attractive and healthier when wearing masks.
Published in the journal i-Perception in 2021, the study involving 286 men and women also contradicted research by the same authors in 2016, which had found participants associated masks with disease.
Dr Khandis Blake — an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Melbourne's school of psychological sciences — said that, not only was taking responsibility for your health considered more attractive these days, but blue masks may also be seen as a "symbol of expertise and attractiveness".
"Particularly when it comes to women's attractiveness [to] men. Symbols that indicate high status can be things that make you more attractive — a bit like wearing a lab coat," she said.
"I'm sure there are a lot of male scientists out there who would say putting on a lab coat doesn't exactly make the ladies come running … but being able to indicate that you can embody these cultural ideas of being high status can, on average, make men more attractive."
Dating app users call out 'mask fraud'
In South Korea, wearing a mask has become so ubiquitous on dating apps that a new buzzword has emerged to refer to people with mask-heavy profiles.
After a surge in the amount of photos showing people in masks, dating app users coined the term "magikkun".
A mix of the English word "mask' and the Korean word for fraud, "sagikkun", it essentially translates to "mask fraud".
Users have been complaining that they are being repeatedly led on and are calling for "magikkun" profiles to be regulated, local media has reported.
Dr Blake said people using masks on dating apps was no different to the benefits afforded to people who were able to use makeup to cover blemishes.
"You can use a camera angle of a selfie to make your face look better … the mask can offer a similar kind of thing, at least for those dating profiles," she said.
Dr Blake said she did not believe that attractiveness had necessarily changed due to the pandemic, but that the ways that we demonstrate that we're attractive have adapted to the current context.
