Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How does hair color affect people’s first impression of a face? Equipped with state-of-the-art Generative AdversarialNetwork (GAN) models, we are able to re-investigate the questions with strictly and precisely controlled image stimuli.By creating triplets of the same face image with different hair colors, we examine how black/brown/blond hair colorsaffect perception of attractiveness, trustworthiness and intelligence. Our study finds that if the original hair color is dark,the optimal choice in most cases is to stay in dark colors. If your original hair color is blond, changing into brown will,in general, make you look more intelligent, sometimes at the cost of attractiveness. The specific best color choice variesa lot more for people with blond hair. Furthermore, we train a neural network model that predicts people’s impressionson faces in different trait dimensions accurately. This study could provide guidance to people regarding their image andimpression control.