Neoteny
the baby-face advantage your brain can't turn off
Grounded in the research on Wikipedia: Neoteny (with origins in zoologist Julius Kollmann's 1880s work on retained juvenile traits)
the setup
neoteny is keeping juvenile features into adulthood. on a face that means big eyes, smooth full cheeks, a small nose, a rounded jaw, a high forehead. it's not about being attractive in general, it's specifically about reading young. humans are a famously neotenous species, and looksmaxxing forums obsess over it because a youthful face tends to get read as warm, healthy, and unthreatening.
the science
the term traces to zoologist Julius Kollmann in the 1880s for retained juvenile traits, and Stephen Jay Gould popularized the human angle in "Ontogeny and Phylogeny" (1977), arguing we evolved by holding onto baby-like features. ethologist Konrad Lorenz called the cue set Kindchenschema, the baby schema. solid evolutionary biology. just don't confuse the real research with the forum claim that you can re-engineer your adult skull toward it.