A growing body of research has long suggested that being attractive can open doors: better jobs, higher pay, and even more votes in elections. This phenomenon, known as the “beauty premium,” means that people who are considered good-looking often enjoy more social and economic benefits than others. But is this bias found everywhere, or is it just a feature of Western societies? And how deeply is it rooted in our cultures?
A recent study set out to answer these questions by looking at an unexpected place: our languages. Researchers used advanced machine learning tools called word embeddings, which analyze how words are related to each other in large collections of texts. By examining these relationships in 68 different languages, they could measure how closely words for “beauty” are linked to words for “success,” “affluence,” and other positive traits.
The results were striking. In English, words related to beauty were much more closely associated with words like “good,” “pleasant,” “success,” and “affluence.” On the flip side, words linked to “ugliness” were more often connected to “bad,” “unpleasant,” “failure,” and “poverty.” This pattern supports the common stereotype that “what is beautiful is good,” showing that our language itself carries this bias.
But the study didn’t stop at English. When the researchers looked across 68 languages, they found that the beauty premium is nearly universal. In most languages, beauty was strongly connected to success. However, there were important differences. For example, Finnish and Japanese showed an even stronger beauty premium than English, while in some languages like Burmese and Vietnamese, the association between beauty and success was weak or even negative. This means that while the beauty premium exists in many cultures, its strength varies widely.
The study also found that beauty was linked to qualities like competence, trust, and confidence in language. This matches real-world findings where attractive people are often seen as more capable and trustworthy, even when there’s no evidence for it.
These findings suggest that the beauty premium is not just a personal bias but a cultural one, deeply embedded in the way we speak and think. Since language reflects the values and beliefs of a society, this bias may change over time as cultures evolve. Understanding the beauty premium as a learned, cultural bias could help us find better ways to address its effects in workplaces, schools, and beyond.
In short, the words we use every day reveal a hidden, global bias: for much of the world, beauty really does pay.
