Are large pupils sexier?

Sexy is different things to different people. It’s very possible that your eyes communicate warmth and softness because of the pupil size, but it’s also possible that it’s not your eyes but your personality that’s responsible for the overabundance of boys.

As for the eyes—Dr. Eckhard H. Hess, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, has come up with some convincing proof that pupil size in women can cause different attitudes in men. In an experiment, he showed two photographs of a pretty young woman to a group of men. Both photographs were identical, but in one the woman’s pupils had been retouched so that they were larger. In the other, they were made smaller.

How did the men react?

None of them noticed the pupil difference consciously, but all described the picture of the woman with the large pupils as soft, more feminine, and pretty.

The same woman with small pupils was seen as hard, selfish, or cold.

These results were more obvious when the woman had blue eyes.

It seems clear that large pupils make a woman more attractive to men, no matter what the woman is really like. Perhaps blue eyes emphasize the difference. Your father, in calling your eyes sexy, is simply putting into slang his feelings that you are pretty, warm, and feminine.

There’s very little new under the sun, and for hundreds of years, women have arrived at Dr. Hess’s conclusion empirically. They’ve used the drug belladonna (which contains atropine) to make their eyes more beautiful.

Atropine dilates the pupils of the eyes.

There are additional fascinating facts that Dr. Hess’s work and the work of others have turned up about pupil size and people. Younger people have larger pupils than older people, and the youth is usually more physically attractive.

Large pupils indicate interest on the part of the person who has them. Work was done in this field (the new and growing science of pupillometry) shows that in men and women the pupil expands when we look at something we like. It’s easy to conclude that the person who looks at you with large pupils likes you. We find people who like us much more attractive than people who don’t. Is this why we like people with large pupils?

Men’s pupils dilate when they see a woman with large pupils, but their pupils do not change when they look at other men with either large or small pupils. 

However, many women’s pupils grow larger when they look at another woman with small pupils! Do these women prefer other women who seem cold, or are women with small pupils less of a challenge?

Two experimenters in pupillometry at the University of Missouri dilated the pupils of a man by using eyedrops and found that he was preferred as a partner by both men and women—at least when they had to choose between him and a nondilated-eye partner.

At the University of Toronto, pupillometrists found that male homosexuals prefer women with small pupils.

A final and thought-provoking finding at Toronto was that heterosexual Don Juans who wanted sex with many women, rather than a relationship with just one, have the same pupil response to women as homosexuals have. Are these men unconscious homosexuals? Or are they attracted by seemingly cold women who are less likely to be permanent partners?