Ethersnap

For female subjects, too, there may be a difference in how they pose for other women. “There’s something special about a woman’s eye,” Ms. McPherson said. “Maybe it’s an innate understanding how other women like to be perceived or the message they’d like to communicate with their style.

Dr. Farid and Eric Kee, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Dartmouth, are proposing a software tool for measuring how much fashion and beauty photos have been altered, a 1-to-5 scale that distinguishes the infinitesimal from the fantastic. Their research is being published this week in a scholarly journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Their work is intended as a technological step to address concerns about the prevalence of highly idealized and digitally edited images in advertising and fashion magazines. Such images, research suggests, contribute to eating disorders and anxiety about body types, especially among young women.