Shocking New Study Finds People Remember Uggos, Forget ‘Pretty’ People

By Doug Barry | February 9, 2014 | 6:30pm

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In a study that just seems tailor made for the Daily Mail, researchers have made a STARTLING and GROUNDBREAKING discovery about attractiveness: it certainly helps to be conventionally attractive so that you can blend into the vast sea of symmetrical(ish) human faces and be a productive, prosperous, non-hideous member of society, but people are more likely to remember you if you’re ugly (with “ugly” meaning, roughly, Charles Laughton’s Quasimodo, not Disney’s).

So, according to the Daily Mail (because of course according to the Daily Mail), being ugly (or having some sort of remarkable features) makes people more memorable. Researchers at Germany’s University of Jena found that people, when showed a pictures of conventionally “pretty” faces,” more often said that they recognized a face that they’d never seen before. The study’s Holger Wiese explained these fits of self delusion thusly: “We obviously tend to believe that we recognize a face just because we find it attractive.”

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Study participants actually remembered faces that were misshapen, lopsided, melting, pimpled, or otherwise distinctive. Sometimes, though, distinctive features can be arranged in an attractive way, and it’s those people who’ve been blessed with a distinctive sort of beauty that breaks free from conventional symmetry while setting a new beauty standard all to itself that have the most societal advantages — people remember them AND they get all the best shit, i.e. jobs, fame, money, and fancy clothes tailored just for them.