Originally published 2017-04-21.
Can you tell who is in love just by looking at people? In this short film, a group of children and a group of adults are shown a line-up of people and asked to pair them into couples based on appearance alone. The video, called "Just Love", was made by the Italian cosmetics brand WYCON, and it is worth watching for the reasons people give as much as for the guesses themselves. Below the video, we look at what science says about whether partners really look alike.
What the video asks
The set-up is simple. Participants see several people and must decide who belongs with whom. With nothing to go on but faces, clothes, age and body language, they have to build a story about each pair. As they explain their choices, you hear the clues they rely on, and the real couples are then revealed.
The film poses the question "What is love?" and lets the comparison between the two age groups do the talking. Whether or not the guesses are right, the exercise exposes how quickly we turn a glance into a judgement about someone's relationship.
Who made it and why
WYCON is an Italian make-up brand, and "Just Love" was published on its official YouTube channel. Like many brand films of the 2010s, it is designed to be shared: it barely shows a product and instead invites viewers to think about their own assumptions. It reached a wide audience after being picked up by inspirational video sites, which is how it first appeared here.
Do couples really look alike?
There is a popular belief that long-married couples grow to resemble each other. It traces back largely to a 1987 study led by psychologist Robert Zajonc at the University of Michigan, which looked at the faces of about a dozen couples and suggested they became more alike over the years.
A much larger study tested that idea in 2020. Pin Pin Tea-makorn and Michal Kosinski of Stanford University compared photos of 517 couples taken near the start of their marriages with photos taken 20 to 69 years later. They measured resemblance with a facial-recognition algorithm and with human judges, who also tried to guess which pairs were married. Published in Scientific Reports, the study found that spouses' faces were somewhat similar from the beginning but did not become more similar over time.
The authors explained the early resemblance through partner choice: people tend to pair up with others who are similar to them in traits such as age, height, weight and ethnicity. That gives guessers a small edge. It also means appearance-based guesses lean on averages, and many real couples sit far from the average.
Why looks are a weak clue
Matching by appearance tends to reward the most conventional pairings: people of similar age, style and background. Couples with a big age gap, different heights, contrasting fashion or different ethnic backgrounds are easy to miss, and same-sex couples may not be considered at all by someone who assumes every couple is a man and a woman. None of those features says anything about how two people get on.
What actually holds relationships together, such as shared humour, trust, values and history, is invisible in a line-up. That is the quiet point of the film: love does not come with a visible uniform.
Try it at home
- Pause the video before the reveal and write down your own pairings, with one reason for each.
- Compare your reasons with those of the children and the adults. Which clues did you share?
- If you watch with children, ask what made them choose each pair. Their answers often show where ideas about couples come from.
- Notice any pairing you ruled out quickly, and ask yourself why.
Sources: WYCON cosmetics on YouTube: Just Love; Stanford GSB: Spouses' Faces Are Similar but Do Not Become More Similar with Time (2020); Fox News: Study debunks theory that couples start to look alike over time; SAYS: WYCON, an Italian make-up brand. First shared via Higher Perspectives.
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