Being ugly could literally make you more likely to die — even decades down the road.
That's the takeaway from a new study in the journal Social Science & Medicine and flagged by PsyPost, revealing that people rated as most unattractive in their high school photos tend to have shorter lifespans and higher mortality rates than more attractive people.
The researchers, from Arizona State University and University of Texas at Austin, analyzed data from a long-running study that tracked more than 8,300 Wisconsin high school students from 1957 to their old age or death, and tasked independent arbiters to look at the participants' old high school yearbook photos to rate their attractiveness.
Then they worked to understand connections between those appearance ratings and the participants' longterm wellbeing. The grim result? The ones rated most unattractive in high school tended to live briefer lives: men by a year, and women by a full two years.
Other takeaways were less clear. There was no difference in mortality rates between very pretty people and average-looking folks, so it seems like pretty privilege has diminishing returns at a certain point, at least when it comes to longevity.
The crux of the study makes sense, though. In the researchers' thinking, attractiveness can easily facilitate social stratification, meaning that the least conventionally beautiful people are more likely to miss out on employment and beneficial social connections, leading to more challenging lives overall that eventually translate to higher mortality. Previous studies have found that beautiful people are considered more trustworthy and also earn more money compared to others.
"I have always thought that attraction is an understudied aspect of social inequality," Arizona State University social science associate professor and one of the study authors Connor M. Sheehan told PsyPost. "It may not be as structural as other dimensions but everyone knows that it is important."
No wonder people clamor for plastic surgery, which has seen double-digit growth in recent years in America, as a way to claim some of that pretty privilege.
More on physical attractiveness: Scientists Shocked That Middle School is Horrible if You’re Ugly and Bad at Sports
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