Aesthetically, What Do We Look for in Our Leaders?

Aesthetically, how can you inspire confidence in your leadership ability?

How do we want our leaders to look?

Is an intelligent appearance more important than a healthy one for a leader?

These are the questions posed by researchers in a Dutch study. The study found that the most important thing that we look for when choosing a leader is a healthy appearance.

In the study, 148 adults were shown 2 photos of the same man. The photos had been digitally altered to show the man looking more healthy or more intelligent.. They were asked which of the men should be chosen to become the new CEO. The subjects studied were also given a description of the CEO’s main challenge.

Overall participants chose more healthy-looking faces 69% of the time.

Study leader author, Associate Professor Brian Spisak at the department of management and organization at VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands said, “Here we show that it always pays for aspiring leaders to look healthy, which explains why politicians and executives often put great effort, time and money in their appearance,”

Spisak concluded: “If you want to be chosen for a leadership position, looking intelligent is an optional extra under context-specific situations whereas the appearance of health appears to be important in a more context-general way across a variety of situations,”

In the majority of before and after photos of my cases, I’ve always noticed that the after image look more healthy. Interestingly, the aim may have been to make the person’s appearance more young or beautiful, but a benefit or side effect is an improvement in the appearance of health.

In laser cases the patient will achieve a much more healthy look, with the removal of,  for example, sun damage, capillaries, old age warts and moles.

In injectable cases, the patient will often look less tired, less drawn and more fresh. For volume loss cases (which is the majority of my work), the improvement in the appearance of health is particularly obvious.

It’s interesting that I have always focused on the improvement of beauty, but it’s great to see it from a new angle.

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