We spend enormous amounts of time teaching professionals how to make a good first impression. Dress appropriately. Make eye contact. Improve your posture. Perfect your handshake. Update your LinkedIn profile. Learn how to communicate with confidence.
But what happens when the first impression begins before any of those things?
Research suggests that appearance can influence how people are perceived in professional settings. Attractive individuals have received more favorable employment-related evaluations in experimental studies. Older applicants have encountered discrimination in hiring research. Even CEOs who simply look more competent have been associated with higher compensation, despite no evidence that their companies actually perform better.
That creates an uncomfortable dilemma around the emerging idea of the Business Face.
If appearance can influence professional perception, it is understandable that executives, entrepreneurs and other professionals might invest more attention in it.
But should they have to? At what point does professional presentation become accommodation of workplace bias?
The Appearance Bias We Don’t Like to Admit
There is a name sometimes used for discrimination based on physical appearance: lookism.
Unlike more familiar workplace biases, it can be difficult to identify because it often hides inside subjective judgments.
Someone “looks the part.” Another candidate doesn’t seem to have “executive presence.” One person appears energetic. Another seems tired. Someone simply doesn’t feel like “the right fit.”
Those judgments may have nothing to do with attractiveness. But research suggests appearance can quietly influence professional evaluations.
A meta-analysis published in Personnel Psychology examined experimental studies involving physical attractiveness and employment-related outcomes. Researchers found that attractive individuals generally received more favorable job-related evaluations than less attractive individuals, with a weighted average effect size of 0.37. The effect applied to both men and women, and perhaps most notably, professional evaluators were just as susceptible to attractiveness bias as college students.
That doesn’t mean every hiring manager favors attractive candidates or that attractiveness determines professional success. It means the bias is measurable. And once we know that, the Business Face becomes more complicated.
When Looking Competent Isn’t the Same as Being Competent
Perhaps one of the clearest illustrations comes from the executive suite.
Researchers John Graham, Campbell Harvey and Manju Puri asked nearly 2,000 people to evaluate photographs of corporate executives. Participants tended to perceive CEOs as looking more competent than non-CEOs, and CEOs of larger companies were perceived as more competent than those running smaller companies.
Perceived facial competence was also associated with CEO compensation.
If the story ended there, it might be tempting to conclude that people who look like leaders simply make better leaders.
But the researchers found no evidence that companies led by more competent-looking CEOs performed better. The published research also found the compensation premium associated with competent-looking faces was driven by outside CEO hires a situation in which first impressions may carry particular weight.
In other words, the appearance of competence and actual competence are two very different things. That’s not an argument for professionals to become better at looking competent. It’s an argument for organizations to become better at recognizing how easily appearance can be mistaken for ability.
Why Professional Men Are Paying Attention Anyway
Of course, understanding that a bias exists doesn’t make someone immune to its consequences. Professionals already make countless decisions about presentation. They choose clothing for interviews, update hairstyles, whiten teeth, exercise, invest in professional photography and think carefully about how they appear on LinkedIn or a company website.
For some men, aesthetic treatment has entered that broader conversation.
Dr. Douglas Steinbrech has spent much of his career focusing on male aesthetics and observing how men’s attitudes toward appearance have evolved. He is the author of Male Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, a 614-page medical reference devoted specifically to male aesthetic procedures and the ways male aesthetic goals and anatomy can require a distinct approach. Steinbrech also currently serves as Treasurer/Secretary of The Aesthetic Society.
According to Dr. Steinbrech, “I hear more men talking about appearance as one part of their overall professional presence. They want how they present themselves to feel consistent with the career and reputation they’ve built, but they understand that appearance is only the introduction. Experience, ability and performance are what establish professional value.”
That distinction is critical. A professional can care about his appearance without believing his face determines his worth. The problem begins when maintaining a certain appearance starts to feel less like a personal choice and more like an unofficial requirement for remaining competitive.
Age Adds Another Layer
The Business Face conversation becomes even more complicated when attractiveness bias intersects with age.
One of the largest U.S. field experiments examining age discrimination involved more than 40,000 fictitious job applications. Researchers found robust evidence of age discrimination against older women, particularly those nearing retirement age, while finding considerably less evidence of age discrimination against older men in the occupations they studied.
That gender difference matters. Ageism should not be discussed as though every worker experiences it in exactly the same way.
But the broader concern remains relevant to professional men. If gray hair communicates experience but other visible signs of aging are interpreted as fatigue, declining energy or reduced adaptability, an older professional can find himself navigating contradictory expectations: look experienced, but not old; mature, but not tired; established, but still current. That’s a remarkably narrow target.
“These men aren’t necessarily asking to look younger, they’re asking not to be misread. They may value the maturity and authority that come with age while feeling that certain aspects of their appearance communicate fatigue or diminished energy that doesn’t reflect who they are professionally.” Dr. Steinbrech said.
The question is whether responding to those concerns empowers the individual or reinforces the stereotype that created the concern in the first place. The answer may sometimes be both.
When Personal Choice Meets Structural Bias
Imagine a 58-year-old executive who believes looking less tired will make him feel more confident when meeting clients. If he chooses aesthetic treatment because he wants it, that’s a personal decision.
Now imagine that same executive believes he needs to look younger because his company increasingly favors younger leaders, leaving him concerned that visible signs of aging could cause senior management to question his relevance. The procedure itself hasn’t changed, but the motivation behind it has, and that distinction is what makes the ethics surrounding Business Face so complicated.
Personal decisions about appearance don’t happen in a vacuum. Workplace culture can influence how people see themselves and, ultimately, what begins to feel like a personal choice. The answer isn’t to suggest that professionals shouldn’t care about their appearance, nor is it realistic to pretend appearance never influences perception when research suggests otherwise. But aesthetic treatment can’t and shouldn’t be positioned as the solution to workplace discrimination.
“A man shouldn’t feel that he has to change his appearance to prove he’s still relevant professionally. Aesthetic treatment should come from what he wants for himself, not from pressure to fit someone else’s idea of what a successful or capable professional should look like.” Dr. Steinbrech noted.
That distinction gives both physicians and employers responsibilities. The physician can help a patient think realistically about what aesthetic treatment can and cannot accomplish. The employer has a different job: making sure professional opportunity isn’t quietly being determined by someone’s face.
Should Appearance Be a Protected Workplace Characteristic?
Here’s where the Business Face discussion becomes even more provocative.
We generally recognize that employers shouldn’t make decisions based on characteristics unrelated to someone’s ability to perform a job. Yet appearance can occupy a murkier territory.
Some appearance characteristics intersect with legally protected categories such as age, disability, race, religion or sex. But broader preferences surrounding attractiveness or conventional appearance don’t always fit neatly into those categories.
That creates a larger ethical question even where a particular employment practice may be lawful:
Should looking the part matter when looking the part has nothing to do with doing the job?
The CEO research offers an almost perfect illustration of the problem. Participants saw competence in certain faces. Compensation appeared to reflect some of those perceptions. Yet the perceived competence did not translate into superior company performance.
The face influenced the impression. The impression influenced outcomes. But, the impression wasn’t evidence of better performance.
Maybe the Competitive Edge Is Recognizing the Bias
There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to look good professionally. A new suit can make someone feel confident. A flattering haircut can do the same. So can fitness, skincare, better sleep, a professional headshot or, for someone who chooses it, aesthetic treatment. Those decisions don’t need to be justified by economic return.
But there’s a significant difference between saying, “I want to look this way,” and saying, “I need to look this way so people will take me seriously.”
The first is personal presentation.
The second should make us question the workplace.
Perhaps that’s ultimately where the Business Face conversation needs to go. Appearance is undeniably part of a first impression, and pretending otherwise doesn’t eliminate the potential for bias. But acknowledging that reality doesn’t mean we have to accept appearance as a measure of professional value. If anything, research surrounding attractiveness, age and perceived competence should make businesses more aware of how quickly visual impressions can turn into judgments about someone’s ability.
A man’s face may create an impression before he ever speaks, but it can’t tell us how well he will lead a team, solve a problem, close a deal or run a company. Those qualities are demonstrated through experience, judgment and performance: not appearance. So perhaps Business Face isn’t the next competitive edge after all. The real advantage may be learning to recognize the influence of appearance while becoming better at seeing beyond it.
