Facial Neoteny
why baby-faced features read as attractive — and where that logic breaks
Grounded in the research on Wikipedia: Neoteny / Konrad Lorenz Kindchenschema; Cunningham 1986 facial attractiveness studies
what it is
Facial neoteny means keeping juvenile facial traits into adulthood: big eyes set low, a small nose, full cheeks, smooth skin, a rounder face, a smaller jaw relative to the skull. It's a specific slice of neoteny — the broad term for retained youthful features. Here the lens is purely the face. Plenty of faces read as attractive partly because they hold onto these soft, baby-ish proportions instead of fully hardening with age.
the science
Konrad Lorenz, the ethologist, coined Kindchenschema ("baby schema") in 1943 — the idea that big eyes, round cheeks and small features trigger a caregiving instinct. Decades later, psychologist Michael Cunningham (1986) measured faces and found people rated neotenous features like large eyes and small noses as more attractive. So the pull is real and studied — but it's one ingredient, not a master formula. Don't overstate it.