I’m an adult man, and I’ve never cared much about how I appear to others. This allows me to dress for comfort and practicality, and saves me a lot of money. However, I’m basically ignoring the common wisdom that appearances matter more than you’d think. So I’m naturally wondering if I’m making a mistake. I suspect several LessWrongers find themselves in similar situations.
Roughly, the model I’m following is as follows: My situation (work, social circle, self-image) is such that nobody cares much about how I look. There is little to gain beyond a low bar, where the low bar consists of things like getting a haircut every 3 months, don’t smell bad and don’t have holes in your clothes that show skin.
My main evidence in support of this picture comes from my own uncontrolled daily experiment: There is a high natural variance in how good I look. Sometimes I recently had a haircut and I’m wearing nice clothes, and sometimes I’m due a haircut and wearing particularly worn clothes. So if looks mattered significantly, I should observe positive outcomes significantly correlated with appearance. However, I essentially don’t. I conclude that the effect of appearances in my daily life can’t be that strong.
However, I’ve recently started looking into the possibility of acquiring a romantic partner. And for this purpose, looks matter a lot. A life partner can be a large factor in my overall life happiness and satisfaction. So now I’m wondering if the general advice that everyone should care about appearances, is primarily motivated by this single use-case?
My Appearance
Here are some examples of my choosing practicality and saving money over looking good:
I usually wear 5-10 year old t-shirts that I got for free at some event.
When needed I wear a sun hat that covers my face, ears and neck all at the same time, much more effectively than a cap. A friend once commented on it saying “my wife would never let me wear a sun hat”. Alternatively, I sometimes use an umbrella to shield from the sun.
My things (water bottle, wallet, clothing, etc.) generally look quite worn out, as I keep them until they lose their function, not just until they are worn.
I sit / stand / lean whatever way I find most comfortable, which is usually not optimal visually.
I am however relatively tall and fit, which might offset some of my choices above. Furthermore, I do adhere to some low bar, such as cutting my hair every ~3 months and throwing away clothes with visible holes.
Standard Reasons to Care
There are some commonly quoted reasons for why one should care about looks:
Self-esteem / self-confidence: Apparently people link their self-esteem to their appearance.
This seems strange to me. I have pretty high self-esteem, and it doesn’t seem significantly correlated with how I appear. If I smelled terribly, I would feel self-conscious about bothering others. However, this is a very low bar to pass, I don’t see much gains beyond that.Better treatment in social situations: Apparently people treat you better if you’re attractive.
This seems plausible, especially when meeting random people. Even so, this effect seems negligible among the people I regularly interact with. If it were a significant effect in my daily life, I would expect to detect differences in treatment correlating with natural variance in my appearance. However, I find no discernible change whether I wear a decade-old, faded t-shirt with three months since a barber visit, or fresh clothes and haircut. This leads me to conclude that the social benefit, for me, must be quite small.Professional / work: Apparently appearances are useful for your career.
This is clearly true for many lines of work, like public figures, but I expect the effect size to be small in my case. I don’t have solid evidence either way; maybe my career would indeed be much more advanced if I was more handsome. However, I seem to have no problems finding work, and detect no bad first impressions in job interviews. Additionally, since my work can in principle be done remotely, over text really, I don’t think appearances matter much.
In summary, I seem to be doing fine with my current unoptimized looks, and I see little evidence that better looks would yield better outcomes for me.
There is only one clear exception: looking good for the benefit of a romantic partner.
The Only Reason I Understand
Dating is highly attraction-based. We evolved to select good partners, and physical attraction is one of the primary heuristics. Even after dating, a romantic partner might gain significant overall life satisfaction from me optimizing my appearance, even if I don’t care myself.
I get the impression that I’m not “supposed” to care about appearances only for the sake of a romantic partner. My mother didn’t sell it like that. The vibe I get is that you should do it “to become a better person” or “do it for yourself”. If I’m going to change my habits and spend much more money on clothing and accessories, I would expect better responses from declaring that I’m doing these things to “better myself” than saying I’m doing them to “attract and satisfy a romantic partner”.
My hypothesis is that people who internalize the belief that they care about appearances “to become a better person” on average perform better than people who explicitly optimize to attract romantic partners. Focusing directly on the goal of satisfying a romantic partner could have many pitfalls. For example, you might conclude that your romantic partner is already locked in, so you can stop trying (which would then hurt the partner). Or you might over-optimize to appear attractive to one particular partner (who seems like the one at the time), but then break up with them and be left stranded. The general advice of caring about appearances seems generally more robust than the direct policy of optimizing for partner attraction and satisfaction.
Question
I’m interested in ways to detect the significance of my appearance outside of dating. Maybe a social experiment I could run in my daily life. It’s not hard to seek out situations which highlight the importance of looks: I could partake in political debates or do stage performances. However, I’m looking for reasons to look good in my daily life, not just in contrived circumstances.
I’m aware that my circumstance is unusual in the general population. If I was a famous personality or did in person marketing, appearances would clearly matter. However, I assume that here on LessWrong there are others in similar situations to mine, where the standard justifications seem weak, for reasons described above. What do you think? Does my appearance primarily matter for romantic partners? Or am I missing something?
When it comes to appearance, the large majority of people look generic and unremarkable. In order to capture significant benefits from appearance, the main problem is to (a) be noticeable at all, and (b) not in a “wow that guy looks noticeably terrible” sort of way (like e.g. a hobo).
I personally have A Look. Waitstaff at restaurants recognize me the second time I go, and if I have a regular dish they remember it pretty quickly. People at conferences immediately recognize me, even if I don’t wear a nametag and we haven’t met in person before. Random passers-by on the street regularly compliment my outfit. People dress up as me for Halloween.
But more importantly than any of that, my clothes immediately communicate a vibe about what kind of social role I’m playing.
Almost everyones’ clothes communicate that they’re role-playing an NPC; they’re wearing things which extras with no lines would wear in the background in a movie. The things I wear look like, at minimum, a named character. So people intuitively expect that I will act like a named character—that I will have crazy plans and sometimes even be able to pull them off, that I somehow know things ordinary mortals don’t know or can do things ordinary mortals can’t do, that I can get away with saying things most people wouldn’t say, etc. So they’re less likely to push back on that sort of stuff, and more likely to roll (role?) with it.
One thing this all means for you: you probably haven’t tested an extreme enough intervention to notice significant results.
This is true.
The first time I mentioned “John Wentworth” to someone at Lighthaven, they asked me: “who’s that?” I said, “you’ve seen him around, he’s that guy who looks like The Blues Brothers.” “Oh.”
Though be aware that this comes with social costs. You get classified as weird, which means you lose out on a bunch of “normal” opportunities, but in exchange get to do a lot of stuff which “normal” people can’t. Depending on your values, this is often a very favorable deal, just one you should know about.
I also have A Look (though much more on the hobo side of things than John), which grants me a “wise hermit” kind of vibe where people will ask me for information about the world and respect my ideas, but I’m viewed as low status by “corporate type people” (for lack of a better description) and am initially viewed as unattractive by women (this is later counteracted somewhat by the status effects of seeming wise).
This can be done in a way which doesn’t cost significant weirdness points.
The key, I think, is to include a lot of coolness in whatever you’re signalling. Being “cool” is largely about embracing countersignalling in all its glory; coolness and conformity are strongly opposed. Being cool is the main way I know of that one can be very nonnormal/nonconformist without paying lots of weirdness points and seeming low status.
Do you have specific advice on how to develop or select said style? So far, I’m just wearing jeans and t-shirts most of the time and have been most of my life. After reading this I tried to find inspiration but after my (admittedly limited) search, most looked like a model wearing normal street clothes, a very WASPy outfit, or just weird in the wrong direction/not my style.
I’d start by looking at some fictional characters or musicians for inspiration.
Personally, I ended up with my current look over many little steps, but I don’t necessarily think that’s the best way to do it.
I have a friend with an impressively massive beard, which he’s frequently complimented for. However, two separate women have indicated to me in private that they find the beard unattractive. This, together with other personal experiences, leads me to believe that number of compliments can be a misleading metric for looking good.
Specifically, I think standing out will give me more compliments, pretty much independently of whether it improves my attractiveness, and it will be hard to tell if I’m actually becoming less attractive. I’m therefore focusing mostly on (b).
It will help get early dates, but it also sets a tone for what they should expect in the future.
Short answer: yes.
Long answer: being romantically desirable via being hot is not the be-all and end-all. If someone is mildly attracted to you, you’ll have more pleasant interactions with them. I have felt this in both directions for myself.
Then those effects percolate outwards as “status” (in the generic rationalist description of the word). If third parties see you having positive interactions with other people, they’ll think more highly of you.
And also, non-autistic individuals (I mean in the actual, clinical sense of autism; the effect I’m describing is actually one of the most interesting and unique features of autism as opposed to just social awkwardness) preferentially ally themselves with people they expect to be high-status. So if you’re attractive, since people (on some level which is basically instinctual) will expect you to be have more social cache with others, they’ll be nicer to you even if they’re not attracted to you, nor have they seen you have a series of positive interactions with people who are.
P.S. I’m unclear from the information you’ve given whether you actually do have high variance in attractiveness over time. E.g. a “fresh” haircut is only good if the haircut looks good on you. For men it is (famously!) often the case that their freshly-cut hair is unattractively short. I usually find 2-10 weeks post-haircut to be optimal. For clothes, do they fit you well? Do the outfits go together and complement your overall style? The variance here comes from “5-year-old T-shirt and jeans” vs “well-fitting shirt and jacket” not vs “new T-shirt and jeans”.
Generally from what you’ve said I’d guess that you’re not getting much natural variance in attractiveness.
If I understand you correctly, essentially you’re saying that the practical effect in my daily life would be that everyone would treat me slightly better. So for example when I ask a friend or colleague to do something with me, they are 10% more likely to accept, which is significant over time, but hard to separate from natural variance. This seems plausible, but hard to verify.
Regarding natural variance I think the variance is significant, but in the downward direction.
Essentially some of my t-shirts are not particularly well designed, covered in sponsors, say specific years like 2016 on them, and the print is visibly worn out from years of laundry. Contrast this to a plain dark t-shirt that I think looks OK, and I think there is a significant difference.
Similarly my hair typically gets cut to about 4cm on top and 1cm on the sides, which I think looks OK right after the haircut. However, after growing about 1 cm per months for 3 months, it starts covering my ears, pube-like hairs grow in the back of my neck, and the ends of my hairs are splitting.
Nevertheless, this variance might not be enough to detect spread out overall treatment changes like the one described in the first paragraph.
My alternative hypothesis is that looks matter a lot for first impressions, but are replaced by stronger status indicators when someone gets to know me better. This would align with how looks matter the most in cases where strangers judge you, like being on stage or in person marketing.
But in this world, the people I interact with daily are people I interact with regularly, so they have stronger signals of social status that override their looks-based initial impression, and hence looks don’t matter much in my daily life (outside of meeting new people like dating).
I admire your desire to run experiments here, however I advise against it. I spent too many years not dressing well or worrying enough about my appearance because I thought it didn’t matter.
I was wrong. It matters a lot. And not just for romance, but for almost all interactions. Everything you can do to look better is like a general stat buff. There is almost no trade-off to make here; there are only the upfront costs of learning to dress better, exercise, etc. and the relatively minor maintenance costs with looking good (can be as little as 2-3 hours a week).
How did you figure out that you were wrong?
What I gather is that you improved your appearance, and then you detected significantly better outcomes in social situations? In which situations was this change most apparent?
How strong did you find this “stat buff”? I have no doubt that buying some new t-shirts is a net good for me, and I’m essentially going in this general direction already because of the dating argument. However, after going from poor appearance to OK appearance, it is much less clear to me how far I should optimize. Should I stop wearing bike helmets? Should I aim for a lower body-fat percentage than what is purely healthy?
Your advice is likely directionally correct, and a nerd like me is unlikely to actually overshoot and care too much about appearances, but I’m still curious.
Gordon did write https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kJoyRgDDPzMg4Fo3Z/nice-clothes-are-good-actually for more details.
I had not seen that post. It was very useful, thanks!
You are unlikely to overshoot as long as you avoid making your appearance a special interest or hobby.
Also, appearance benefits from marginal improvements, though I feel like there are some phase shifts. I think this is likely because you’re only as attractive as your least attractive attribute, though if you’re attractive (or high status) enough then what seems like a negative attribute can become a positive (think things like unique moles, crooked noses, one weird fashion choice you won’t give up, etc.).
As to how strong of a stat buff, I don’t know, maybe 20-30%? This is complicated to measure because in some cases it’s 100% and other times it’s 0%, like being able to date someone you otherwise wouldn’t be able to date but not being able to date everyone you might like to. But maybe 20-30% of interactions go the way you want instead of not because you garner more positive affect, but it’s not enough to overcome non-marginal blockers unless you achieve 99th percentile attractiveness.
Looking good is an initial filter type thing, which shows you put in the minimum required effort. It’s a signal that you take care of yourself. Though as @Elizabeth notices, that also sets basic expectations.
You can get dates and high quality relationships without looking good, but you’re playing with a large handicap, which you’ll have to overcome with multiple years of high quality friendship or equivalent.
Also, don’t trust your own judgment of whether your clothes look good (unless you have exceptional taste, which I doubt from how you’re phrasing the question) - ask some <target gender> friends whether whatever you’re wearing looks good on you. Even better—ask them to go shopping with you.
I’ve heard good things about Kibbe as a system of working out what looks good on you etc.
I think there are two categories of traits, the fungible and the nonfungible.
Fungible traits are money, height, BMI/weightlifting. Them being able to pull you is a proxy for their social status.
Nonfungible traits are your actual contributions, what type of person you are, what role you play in a friend group or room, etc. Includes kindness, humor, emotional intuitions, etc.
When girls realize that my nonfungible traits aren’t quite their cup of tea, they say “well at least i scored 5′9“ / 6 figures / can pick me up and carry me a dozen feet” and then dump me for someone who’s 5′10” / 7 figures / can pick her up and carry her two dozen feet. But if my nonfungible traits are her cup of tea, fungible traits don’t seem to do much of anything!
In other words, fungible traits are the fallback when a girl doesn’t like you very much. They’re literally only worth considering if you assume she doesn’t like you as a premise.
I think the answer is that clothing is halfway between, or plays both roles. Clothing contributes a lot to the “my friends will think I pulled well if I bring you around them” factor, so they’re like a fungible trait. But clothing is also a vector of self expression, and to many it’s a conscientiousness proxy / proxy to how clean your room is which people are screening for in long term primary relationships.
So idk.
Some more low-hanging fruit for improving your appearance: just don’t have any holes in your clothes at all; toss anything with stains you can’t get out, and anything with frayed and/or overstretched edges anywhere, and any faded clothes – they always fade more in some places than others.
You mention posture, and yes, good posture is very attractive, and people will respect you more, too. Also this is definitely one area where improving does help you “become a better person”, or at least feel more confident and “agentic”; at least, that’s how it’s worked for me.