The 16 Attraction Types: How Common Is Yours? (1,516 Reads)

Every report names a type. Sixteen of them, each a scene with a man in it — the Sunday-Morning Barista, the Poet in the Rain, the Off-Duty Firefighter, the Cover Model — built from four things the read judges in the photos: where the pull comes from, how warm it runs, how much motion it carries, how finished it is. Men share the type more than anything else in the report. They also ask, almost immediately, how common it is.

Four men in five are one of four types. The Sunday-Morning Barista alone is 39% of 1,516 men; the Poet in the Rain is 23%; the Concert Pianist 9%; the Fencer 8%. Twelve types share the remaining fifth, and the six rarest — the loud, kinetic ones — are each about 1%. Underneath the types, the axes are even more lopsided: 91% of men read as still rather than vivid, 78% as face-led rather than body-led, 73% as raw rather than polished.

One thing we will not do on this page, and it is worth saying before the table: we do not publish a read per type. A type is the shape of a man's pull, not its strength, and every type contains men across the whole axis. The moment a table says "Cover Models average X", sixteen descriptions become a tier list, and we did not build sixteen types to build a caste system. What we measure is explicit about this. The figures below are aggregated outputs of our read across men who chose to be read; no personal data; no group under 30 men publishes an average.

Analysis first · $5 for the full report · about a minute

The table shows how often each of the 16 types turns up across 1,516 men. Yours comes with the read: a candid photo and a few quick picks, and the report names your type, the pull it describes, and the levers that sharpen it.

• Your read on the 70–155 first-impression axis, the six-part face read (jawline, cheekbones, eyes, chin, skin, harmony), your ceiling, how many women notice you, and a dated plan
• The analysis runs before you pay. The full report is $5 one-time — no subscription, nothing renews
• A few quick picks (height, weight, build, how you carry yourself) and one more photo next — the read lands about 40 seconds after you submit
• Photos are encrypted, never public, never used to train models, deletable any time

Or start with the questionsSee a full sample result

Key numbers

• Sunday-Morning Barista 39%. Poet in the Rain 23%. Concert Pianist 9%. Fencer 8%. Four types, 79% of men.
• Still 91%, vivid 9%. The energy axis is the most lopsided thing in the data.
• Face-led 78%, body-led 22%.
• Raw 73%, polished 27%. Warm 67%, cool 33%.
• Body-led types stand taller on average: the Fencer 179.5 cm, the Firefighter 178.9 cm, against 169.6 cm for the Barista.

How common is each type?

Very unevenly. Two types are a majority; ten are rare. Here is the full table, with average height and body fat for the six types large enough to publish them:

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The Barista — face-led, warm, still, raw — is the type a quiet, approachable man with a kind face and an unstyled presentation lands in, and it is 39% of everyone. The Poet — the same man run cool — is 23%. Between them they describe a man who is read from the face, holds still, and has not been finished: the most common first glance on the site by a wide margin, and, not coincidentally, the man most of our lever data is written about.

Of the ten rare types, six share one letter: V, for vivid. The Midnight Bartender, Cover Model, Prizefighter, Streetball Baller, Beach Lifeguard, Backstage Rockstar, Life of the Party and Midnight Rider are between them about 9% of men. The loud types are the rare types.

Caveat: types were assigned by the read from the photos a man submitted, and the photo decides more than the man does for two of the four axes. The table is a census of first glances as submitted, not of men as they are at a party.

What are the four axes, and how do men split on them?

Still beats vivid nine to one; face-led beats body-led four to one; raw beats polished three to one; warm beats cool two to one. The poles:

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The axes are not arbitrary. First impressions have structure: Sutherland and colleagues found that impressions of 1,000 everyday photos fall on three dimensions — approachability, dominance and youthful-attractiveness — rather than a single good-to-bad line (Sutherland et al. 2013), and Jones and colleagues' registered report with 11,570 participants in 41 countries found the valence–dominance structure largely replicates across world regions (Jones et al. 2021). Warm/cool is a temperature reading of approachability; face-led/body-led is where the first second lands; still/vivid is motion and expression; raw/polished is finish. None of them is "more attractive"; all of them change who turns around.

Why are the vivid types so rare?

Because vivid is read from motion and expression, and most men submit a still photo of a still face. Nine percent of men read as vivid. That is less a fact about men than a fact about the photos men think they should send.

The research on expression is unambiguous about how much it moves a first glance. Smile intensity strongly shapes which of two faces looks more attractive — a broader smile can offset a less attractive face (Golle et al. 2014). Faces whose gaze turned toward the viewer were rated more likeable and, in a second experiment, more attractive than faces looking away (Mason et al. 2005). Direct gaze is preferred most when the face is smiling (Conway et al. 2008). A man who sends a neutral, eyes-slightly-off photo has chosen still before the read gets a vote.

That makes energy the most movable axis on the list. A Barista who learns how to smile in a photo without it looking fake is a Life of the Party in the same body — and the photo selection protocol is mostly about this axis.

Why do the body-led types stand taller?

Because "body-led" means the first second lands on the frame, and a frame lands first when there is more of it. The Fencer averages 179.5 cm and 15% body fat; the Off-Duty Firefighter 178.9 cm and 21.5%; the Barista 169.6 cm and 16%.

This is the one place we publish a physical average per type, and we do it because it explains the axis rather than ranks it. Cues of upper-body strength explain most of the variance in men's bodily attractiveness (Sell et al. 2017), and a man whose frame carries those cues gets read from the frame — the pull is body-led — while a man whose frame does not gets read from the face. The Barista is not a shorter Fencer who failed; he is a man whose first second is his face, and that is a different pull with a different audience, which is the entire point of having types instead of a number. The height data and the face-vs-physique data are the same split seen from other angles.

Caveat: the ten rare types are below our minimum group size, so no averages are published for them, and their shares are rounded from small counts. Two percent of 1,516 is thirty men; one percent is a dozen.

What does a type tell you, and what doesn't it?

It tells you the shape of the pull you have and who it works on. It does not tell you how strong it is — that is the read — and it does not rank you against other types. Those are three different questions and the report answers them separately on purpose.

Private taste is a large part of attraction: Hönekopp found it accounts for nearly as much of a facial-attractiveness judgment as shared taste (Hönekopp 2006). A type is where private taste lives. The woman who turns around for a Poet in the Rain is not the woman who turns around for a Streetball Baller, and neither of them is wrong. The read says how many people turn around; the type says which ones. A man who knows both stops trying to be a type he isn't and starts sharpening the one he is — which is what the finish axis, the most lever-driven of the four, is for.

If you are reading this to find out whether your type is a good one: they all are, and the question is the wrong shape. The useful question is whether your type is sharp — finished, expressive, in a frame that shows it — or blurred, and the report answers that.

The bottom line

Four types cover four men in five, and the Sunday-Morning Barista alone is 39%. Nine men in ten read as still; the rare types are the vivid ones, and vivid is mostly a photo decision. Body-led types stand taller because a frame that carries strength gets read first. No type is better than another, and we will not publish a table that says otherwise.

Your type is the shape of your pull. The read is its strength. The report gives you both and the levers that sharpen the first without faking the second. The analysis runs before you pay anything; the full report is $5 one-time. Start the test, or see a sample report first.

How this snapshot was built

The figures come from a script that reads the production database and writes only group statistics — counts and shares per type and per axis pole, and average height and body fat for types with 30 or more men — over scored, completed reports that carried a type. No per-type read is computed or published. No identifier, photo, free text or per-person value leaves the database. Snapshot dated 2026-11-07, refreshed monthly; the tables regenerate from it. Quote freely with a link (CC BY 4.0).

Studies referenced

• Sutherland, C. A. M., Oldmeadow, J. A., Santos, I. M., Towler, J., Burt, D. M., & Young, A. W. (2013). Social inferences from faces: Ambient images generate a three-dimensional model. Cognition, 127(1), 105–118. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2012.12.001
• Jones, B. C., DeBruine, L. M., Flake, J. K., et al. (2021). To which world regions does the valence–dominance model of social perception apply? Nature Human Behaviour, 5(1), 159–169. doi:10.1038/s41562-020-01007-2
• Golle, J., Mast, F. W., & Lobmaier, J. S. (2014). Something to smile about: The interrelationship between attractiveness and emotional expression. Cognition and Emotion, 28(2), 298–310. doi:10.1080/02699931.2013.817383
• Mason, M. F., Tatkow, E. P., & Macrae, C. N. (2005). The look of love: Gaze shifts and person perception. Psychological Science, 16(3), 236–239. doi:10.1111/j.0956-7976.2005.00809.x
• Conway, C. A., Jones, B. C., DeBruine, L. M., & Little, A. C. (2008). Evidence for adaptive design in human gaze preference. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 275(1630), 63–69. doi:10.1098/rspb.2007.1073
• Sell, A., Lukazsweski, A. W., & Townsley, M. (2017). Cues of upper body strength account for most of the variance in men's bodily attractiveness. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 284(1869), 20171819. doi:10.1098/rspb.2017.1819
• Hönekopp, J. (2006). Once more: Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? Relative contributions of private and shared taste to judgments of facial attractiveness. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 32(2), 199–209. doi:10.1037/0096-1523.32.2.199