If you want to show your best side turn your left cheek, say scientists. They say the left side of our faces is our best side and others will find us more attractive if they look at us from the left. The left cheek tends to show more emotion and others rate it as our most pleasing side to view us. Pictures of the right side of faces are consistently rated lower and less attractive by onlookers. Researchers think this is because we show a greater intensity of emotion the left side of our face. Others judge our mood from studying our faces and our facial muscles can show a huge range of different emotions allowing us to gauge the mood of friends and enemies. Research also suggests that it is the left side of the face which is more active when we are revealing how we feel to others. It probably explains why Western artists have tended to paint people's portraits from the left side to show their subjects off to the best. One examination of 1,474 Western European portraits found that 64% exposed their left face cheeks while only 33% exposed their right cheeks. The left side bias was even more marked in female portraits. Rembrandt is known to have much preferred painting people's left side. Researchers Kelsey Blackburn and Janes Schirillo from Wake Forest University, America, used photographs of ordinary people to find the differences between the right and left side of their faces. They said: “Our results suggest that posers' left cheeks tend to exhibit a greater intensity of emotion, which observers find more aesthetically pleasing.” They say their findings support the idea of emotions showing differently on different sides of our faces and also the dominance of the right side of our brains in expressing emotion. The right side of the brain controls the left side of our faces. Observers were asked to rate the pleasantness of both sides of ten men and ten women's faces on gray-scale photographs. The researchers presented both original photographs and mirror-reversed images, so that an original right-cheek image appeared to be a left-cheek image and vice versa. They found a strong preference for left-sided portraits, regardless of whether the pictures were originally taken of the left side, or mirror-reversed.
