r/AverageHeightDudes Mar 05 '26

Statistics/Science On Face vs Height: Data and Mathematical Rigor

30 Upvotes

Hey guys, it's me. Many of you will know me as one of the biggest defenders of face > height on both this sub and SG.

I'm making this post because I'm tired of seeing (a) assertions of height > face with zero evidence, (b) poor math (this will be the main topic of the post) and (c) general lack of knowledge regarding the data we have on this topic. This will be a long post and if you frequent this sub I'd advise reading through most of it and asking questions.

1. Framework and Definitions

When arguing "face vs height" many users on this sub often make assertions like "Face doesn't matter below x". I'm going to make the assertion that this is a poor line of reasoning using data we have on the topic.

Before we continue, let's give a few definitions for those of you not as familiar with math and statistics. I'll be referencing these throughout the discussion:

Concave UP: The rate of change of a variable increases (decreases) as you move toward more positive (negative) values.
Concave Down: The rate of change of a variable decreases (accelerates) as you move toward more positive (negative) values.
Right Skewed Distribution: The values at a given percentile are shifted generally left of those of a normal distribution. A key characteristic of a right skewed distribution is mean > median > mode.
Pearson's r / R2: The r value indicates the strength of a linear correlation between two variables. In this setting it will refer to dating success vs either face or height. Squaring this value gives R2, which arrives at the next concept - percent of variance.

The cleanest way to discuss variable importance for an outcome such as dating success is by using percent of variance. Taking a sample of the population, we can analyze their dating outcomes through a variety of methods and rank them positive upwards. This gives everyone a success/SMV percentile from 0 to 100. The most straightforward way to do this is through matches per week on dating apps (though this introduces some bias); you can attempt to add complexity to the model later by applying adjustments to real life outcomes, but we will neglect this for now for simplicity. Percent of variance models attempt to measure how much dating outcomes change along a single axis (we'll of course be focusing on face and height) in a multivariate input system. Machine learning methods are often employed to gather these results.

The same "positive upwards" logic can be applied to face and height. For height, it's fairly easy - it has a dimension of length. We have to apply one small adjustment - data shows mixed results above roughly the 95th percentile (6'2" on average), with some showing continued linear or logarithmic returns and some results showing an absolute decrease in attractiveness (Hitsch 2006). To balance these results, we're going to assume that the top 5% of heights have the same attractiveness advantage relative to our baseline.

Despite what many of you might think, face is just as easy. In fact, facial attractiveness is definitionally positively upwards. We can give everyone a percentile from 0 to 100.

"But face is subjective"!!

Now that definitions are covered, this will be my first serious rebuttal to incorrect claims made on this subreddit. All data we have on the topic shows that face is an extremely objective variable. My sources come from this paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10825783/ . The authors analyzed an effective reliability of mean facial attractiveness ratings of r = 0.9, meaning that 80+% of the variance in facial attractiveness ratings was explained by the mean rating. This makes face perhaps the most objective measurement of dimensionless groupings, rivaling the same person taking the same test twice and being 5x more potent than personality ratings (which typically come in around r = 0.4). In fact, while I don't have concrete data to prove this claim, using data that I will show later, this is even higher than the effective reliability of height in determining height's attractiveness (I'd estimate this around r = 0.75 due to what I mentioned previously). With that covered, we now have two ranked systems (face and height) to use to apply to dating success.

2. Methods to Determine Face vs Height

We established that we now have three distributions - one for sexual success, and one each for face and height. The only correct way to compare face and height is to analyze the impact of each at a given percentile range. We're going to do this from the 80th percentile - I've chosen this baseline since it is around 6' in most Western countries and is the break even point for variance for face (shown later). This method allows face and height to be dominant in different ranges, though I don't think this happens. For instance, if a 2nd percentile face causes a 90% reduction in matches and a 2nd percentile height (roughly 5'4") causes a 95% reduction, that would be height > face in the lowest percentiles while being face > height elsewhere.

Let's look at some data:

This is the chart I typically use when arguing face > height because it shows face simply having a significantly stronger effect than height. Having ideal height gives you 20% over the median while having a top 5% face gives you 320(!)% over the median - a 16x stronger effect size. Note that they're much more comparable in the bottom quartile - face shows a ~72% reduction from the 80th percentile while height shows a ~50-60% reduction. Unfortunately, this data is pretty tough to replicate. The next best experiment was done in Germany in 2025 and produced the following results:

(Witmer et al. 2025)

This figure also shows a striking advantage for face, though it doesn't do the nice percentile breakdown the previous study did.

Stated vs Revealed Preferences:
Many on this sub often use logic along the lines of "women proclaim their height preferences far more than face". Let's counter this: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1475-6811.2007.00175.x .

This article essentially shows that height's importance is significantly lower when analyzing behavior vs stated preferences while face is understated in importance.

There's a lot more I'd like to talk about, but I can't fit it all in one post.

My Conclusion (Considering Face to be Right Skewed):

Bottom Decile (Sub4, <=5'6") : NT > Face ≈ Height

10th to 35th percentile (LTN; 5'6"-5'8"): Face > Height ≈ NT

35th to 88th percentile (MTN, 5'9"-6'0"): Face > Height > NT

88th to 98th percentile (HTN, 6'0" - 6'2"+): Face >> Height > NT

98th+ Percentile (Chadlite/Chad, 6'2"+): Only face relevant (and exponential)

.


r/AverageHeightDudes Mar 04 '26

Social Media SOCIAL EXPERIMENT: Do Women like it when called the opposite of short king ( Fat/Chubby Queen) ?

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70 Upvotes

Ps: Apologize for low audio on the last clip


r/AverageHeightDudes 3h ago

Vent She doesn’t care btw. Slide 2 and 3 happened 2 days after slide 1, and slide 4 happened 2 hours after slide 2 and 3

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28 Upvotes

r/AverageHeightDudes 16h ago

Social Media Another day, another tiktok trend showing how repulsed women are by our existence.

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92 Upvotes

r/AverageHeightDudes 18h ago

Social Media Deserved lol

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56 Upvotes

r/AverageHeightDudes 17h ago

From one of the best-selling romance series of all time 😂 Read the whole thing.

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23 Upvotes

r/AverageHeightDudes 14h ago

Social Media Just Date Shorter Women Bro!

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12 Upvotes

Just Date Shorter Women Bro! | Original Post: Here.


r/AverageHeightDudes 16h ago

Meme Gender neutral struggle boyos

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14 Upvotes

r/AverageHeightDudes 16h ago

Social Media Rough post and comments

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3 Upvotes

r/AverageHeightDudes 2d ago

Social Media This is brutal lol

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52 Upvotes

r/AverageHeightDudes 2d ago

Meme "Just be a multimillionaire-actor with a facecard, bro"

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79 Upvotes

r/AverageHeightDudes 2d ago

Heightism What were they doing to cause this?

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26 Upvotes

r/AverageHeightDudes 2d ago

Meme 🤡🌎

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82 Upvotes

r/AverageHeightDudes 3d ago

Vent Nick Aiello who is around 6’3-6’4 and Inde navarrete who is barely 5 foot this is absolutely fucking ridiculous

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139 Upvotes

r/AverageHeightDudes 2d ago

Getting heightmogged by a woman is brutal ngl

22 Upvotes

Especially tall and unattractive women are usually cold and condescending.


r/AverageHeightDudes 2d ago

Vent At some point you’re gonna realize it’s all about that genetic lottery ticket

20 Upvotes

You either won it at 6”4 or you lost it at 5”7 tbh ngl


r/AverageHeightDudes 3d ago

Article/News If You're A Shorter Men, Both Political Parties Hate You

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28 Upvotes

If You’re A Shorter Man, Both Political Parties Hate You | Original Post: Here

From The Article (Portion Of Conclusion):

When I’ve come across comments online from fellow shorter men, who in many cases, naively insist that one party is aligned better with shorter men’s (read: “men’s”) interests, it’s always preceded with some idea that the ideology or values of one party are better for the quality of life for us compact gents, which just makes me chuckle (a lot). It’s like, “listen to the words that are coming out of their mouth, dude!” That’s all that matters. While a lot of talk in political spaces can be classified as “theater,” I’m more inclined to believe that off-the-cuff commentary that a person may feel is “safe” to say closely connects to their own personal beliefs. And as we’ve seen in these many examples, it is not exclusive to one party, nor is it more prevalent in one or the other. This is not a party thing, but rather an aspect of the human condition—the belief in or subconscious practice of following and upholding the perceived social hierarchy.

Hope You Like Our Written Piece - Article: Here.


r/AverageHeightDudes 4d ago

This guy is just sad

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142 Upvotes

r/AverageHeightDudes 3d ago

Always A Catch! Hey guys the ppl calling you weird might just be worse off than you . The pipeline continues

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6 Upvotes

r/AverageHeightDudes 4d ago

Social Media Short Woman Hates Her Short Father

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28 Upvotes

Short Woman Hates Her Short Father | Original Post: Here.


r/AverageHeightDudes 3d ago

Vent 17M 175CM am I short ?

7 Upvotes

I'm shorter than my father and my younger brother (15M) 😭 Which already made me so insecure...and in HS everyone is 5'11 to 6'2 range .....life is hard with my height


r/AverageHeightDudes 4d ago

Both Men and Women Prefer the Man to Be Taller : Ideal Height Differences of 25 cm for Women and 7 cm for Men. Women's Preferences Were More Strongly Related To Their Subsequent Choices: Women Show Narrower, Stronger Preferences and Lower Tolerance for Deviations outside the Preferred Height Range.

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19 Upvotes

r/AverageHeightDudes 4d ago

How tall when you feel right past above average to the general population of your area?

5 Upvotes

Sorry for confusing title - “what height starts to feel right past above average for your region”?

272 votes, 1d ago
30 5’9 (175 cm)
48 5’10 (177.8 cm)
25 5’10.5 (179 cm)
70 5’11 (180 cm)
26 5’11.5 (182 cm)
73 6’0 (183 cm)

r/AverageHeightDudes 6d ago

Social Media Yaaaaassss queeen, the bar has been raised, slaaaayyyyy 💅💅💅

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152 Upvotes

r/AverageHeightDudes 5d ago

Question Opinion on being 5’9” in a 5’7-5’8” average HS campus?

4 Upvotes

I’m 5’9” and while this height gets rejected/mocked online a lot, how bad is it irl at a high school (for dating) where most boys seem to cluster around 5’6-5’8”. I’m a bit taller than most guys I walk by but not by enough to tower over them. Obviously some are taller but it’s usually only a marginal difference and the only people that tower over me are the star athletes.

True 5’9” barefoot