How Attractive Are You or Aren't?

Forget for a moment the flamboyant, egomaniacal Snooki-type people who clearly are seeing a much more awesome version of themselves when they look in the mirror than actually exists. This isn't about them. No, science says that the odds are overwhelming that you think you're more attractive than you actually are. Experiments on this are downright freaky.

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Not unlike Snooki.

For instance, some scientists took pictures of a group of experiment subjects. Then they altered them in various ways, creating 11 versions of each photo. Some had been drastically photoshopped to make the person more attractive, and some to make the person less attractive. One was left unchanged. The researchers showed the photos to the participants and said, "Which one is the unaltered one?" Now, these are their own faces we're talking about here. But time and time again, they were bad at finding the unaltered photo. Want to guess which ones they were likely to pick out as unaltered? The ones that had been fixed to make the subjects more attractive.

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The camera might add 10 pounds, but apparently it also makes you look like a supermodel.

In other words, the person we see reflected in the mirror is not the reality of what we look like -- it's warped by our brain to make us hotter. This is one of the reasons people claim not to be photogenic or say they hate pictures of themselves. Yeah, right, it's the camera.

Meanwhile, another study found that 1 in 4 overweight people see themselves as being of normal weight. OK, we can kind of see that, since "overweight" is a medical term and maybe they're not even familiar with where the line is. But then you find out that a whopping 70 percent of obese people thought they were just a little bit overweight. Among the morbidly obese, 40 percent thought they needed to lose just a few pounds.

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Just like this blazing inferno needs to lose just a few flames before it horribly suffocates everyone.

And then there's this massive 26,000 person study in which people were asked to rate their own attractiveness. Now, since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the researchers didn't just line up a bunch of people and say, "You think you're good-looking? Get the fuck out of my lab, Sasquatch!" No, they simply asked the people to rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 10, with 5 being an average-looking person. Virtually everyone rated themselves at least a 6 or 7 -- meaning everyone thinks they're "above average." Which is not only mathematically impossible but violates basic common sense about what "average" means.

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Average.

Young people were the most deluded, with about 30 percent of men and women under age 30 claiming they were an 8 to a 10. Again, if that were true, we'd have to adjust the scale so the numbers meant something else -- you'd wind up in a whole Spinal Tap amp discussion.

So just remember this next time you're at Walmart or standing in line at McDonald's -- 3 out of every 10 of the people around you think they are at model levels of hot.