The Research of the Relationship Between People’s Personal Appearance and Taste Preference

In the research reported here, we discussed the possibility of predicting people’s taste preference by the characteristics of their appearance. 21 graduate school students divided into three groups of seven people were examined by questionnaire in this survey. Within each group, participants evaluated their own liking taste and disliking taste. In addition, their characteristics of appearance and the prediction of their taste preference were rated by all the other participants. Afterwards, we tried to investigate the relationship among the self-evaluated taste preference, predicted one by others, and facial features, by means of calculating the correlation coefficient between them. From our results, the features of appearance, such as “pretty” and “beautiful” significantly correlated with predicted taste preference. That is, they were both positively consistent with the taste of sweetness and sourness, while negatively with saltiness, bitterness and spiciness. Though, little significant correlation was demonstrated between the self-evaluated taste liking and facial features directly, positive relationship between self-evaluated taste preference and taste prediction was seen on sourness and spiciness as well. Therefore, it suggests that to some extent it is possible to speculate the preference of sour and spice taste by taking advantage of other clues but facial features.