ArticleFrontiers in psychology2026
Cosmetic enhancement as social signaling: context-dependent effects on facial evaluation in China and the United Kingdom.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
Introduction: Human observers rapidly infer socially relevant traits from faces, yet these judgments can be altered by appearance modifications such as cosmetic enhancement. It remains unclear whether cosmetic enhancement produces similar effects across different dimensions of facial evaluation and whether these effects are interpreted consistently across cultural contexts. The present study examined how cosmetic enhancement influences facial social evaluation among Chinese and British perceivers. Methods: In a preregistered mixed-design experiment, 100 Chinese participants and 99 British participants evaluated East Asian and Caucasian female faces presented in natural, light-makeup, or heavy-makeup conditions. Participants rated each face on attractiveness, dominance, competence, youthfulness, and trustworthiness. Results: Cosmetic enhancement increased perceived attractiveness and youthfulness and also enhanced competence and dominance overall. However, several effects varied according to perceiver nationality and target ethnicity. Trustworthiness showed a particularly context-dependent pattern. Chinese participants rated lightly made-up faces as more trustworthy than natural or heavily made-up faces, whereas British participants showed no significant differences in trustworthiness across makeup conditions. Additional interactions indicated that the effects of cosmetic enhancement on dominance, competence, and youthfulness also depended on the combination of perceiver nationality and target ethnicity. Discussion: These findings suggest that makeup-induced appearance cues can operate as social signals in facial impression formation. Cosmetic enhancement produced relatively general benefits for beauty- and vitality-related impressions, whereas its effects on status-, agency-, and trust-related judgments were more dependent on makeup intensity and the cultural and intergroup context in which the face was evaluated.
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