Nine undisputable signs you are a very handsome gentleman

As the great Derek Zoolander once said, there’s a lot more to life than being really, really, really, ridiculously good looking. But the harsh truth can’t be ignored: dashingly handsome gentleman have it better.

According to a report in Smithsonian a good-looking man is “poised to make 13 percent more during his career than a ‘looks-challenged’ peer”.

But what if unbeknownst to you, you’re a full ten and not taking full advantage of it? An oblivious specimen of perfection wondering around thinking you’re a mere mortal seven?

Handily, we’ve done the hard work for you, sifted through the very latest research, for nine undisputable giveaways that you’re a complete knock-out…

If people think you’re clever, but you know for a fact that you’re a giant dummy (as much as a giant dummy truly knows anything for a fact, or what a fact even is), you might at least be a beautiful one. A yummy dummy.

A study at St Andrews University found that if people think you are attractive, they also perceive you as being more intelligent and a harder worker, even if you’re just a lazy dumbass with a flawless jawline.

However, a study at Rice University found this might not be a good thing – attractive people are held to higher standards so in some ways can be more likely to fail. Keep ballsing things up, do you, thicko? Phwoar!

There's a cognitive bias that men who look great on the outside are great on the inside

You know how, in films, the baddie is always grotesque and disfigured? Blofeld from James Bond, Scar from The Lion King, Freddie Krueger… People have a cognitive bias that assumes the opposite is true: men who look great on the outside are great on the inside.

It’s known as the Halo effect, coined in the 1920s by Edward Thorndike, and pretty much comes down to our silly brains equating good looks with actual goodness.

If people are constantly surprised by your scouldrelry, and look genuinely scandalised every time they see you casually drop a kitten down a well or rob a grieving widow, it could be due to your foxy features.

Symmetry is said to be key to attractiveness, so if the guy gazing back at you in the mirror as you brush your teeth is indistinguishable from the gent in your passport, you could be onto a winner.

It’s supposedly a signifier of good genetic inheritance to have a perfectly symmetrical face, and a study from the University of New Mexico concluded that women in relationships with asymmetrical men were more likely to fantasise about being with other people.

That said, there are plenty of perfectly symmetrical-faced figures – Homer Simpson, Robocop, ET, the majority of the Minions, Shrek – that you wouldn’t necessarily call conventionally hot.

Handsome men earn over 10 percent more than their homelier colleagues

Economist Daniel Hamermesh is the father of pulchronomics, the study of beauty and how it affects everything around it. His book Beauty Pays concluded that handsome men earn over 10 percent more than their homelier colleagues, which over the course of an entire career really adds up.

Plus ugly men have to spend more money on things like toupees, motorbikes, Crack-A-Joke books and those weird waistcoats pick-up artists and magicians wear.

If you’ve constantly got more money than you know what to do with, and are perpetually in demand (Hamermesh also found attractive people are more likely to be hired, even in recessions), you’re either (a) gorgeous or (b) just doing well off your own back. Good news all round really.

Good-looking defendants get more lenient sentences, say social psychologists at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. They found it started as early as school, where cute kids are given the benefit of the doubt in a way that the wonky kid with the eternally seeping plaster on his face isn’t.

So, if you’re a looker feel free to skip the odd red-light or two, and when you are pulled over just give the officer a charming wink and be on your way.

Dr Julian De Silva from The Centre For Advanced Facial Cosmetic And Plastic Surgery in London used advanced mathematics to conclude that handsome movie stars really are handsome. Thanks, Doc.

He did this using the Golden Ratio – two measurements are in the golden ratio if their ratio to one another is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantities, and you know what, it doesn’t matter, there’s nothing handsome about crossed eyes.

Dr De Silva concluded that George Clooney was the most handsome famous man in the world, with his features lying 91.86% accurate to the formula. Brad Pitt, Idris Elba and Zayn Malik all scored 85 or higher, so there must be something to it. Unfortunately, if you have to pluck a calculator out of your pocket to back up your claims of handsomeness, something – ahem – doesn’t add up.

If all your relationships end in disaster, you might just be too dang attractive

If all your relationships end in disaster, it might not be entirely bad news – you might just be too dang attractive. A study from Florida State University found that (heterosexual) relationships were more likely to succeed if the woman was more attractive than the man.

Incidentally, if you’ve ever wondered what the worst idea conceivable is, it’s texting this information to all your ex-partners, telling them things might have worked out if you weren’t so damnably handsome.

A brief craze on Chinese social network Weibo a few years ago was the ‘Finger Trap’, ostensibly a test to see if you qualified as beautiful or not. According to the test, laying your finger from your chin to your nose, if your finger doesn’t touch your lips, you’re beautiful.

This stands up to no scrutiny, because while on the one hand it filters out people with really weak chins, someone with a foot-long conk and Bruce Forsyth chin would qualify as cover model material. Typical, it’s one rule for teenage Chinese girls and another rule for the rest of us.

It’s a long shot, but if you’ve ever been forcibly removed from a culture festival in Saudi Arabia, that could be a pretty good sign that you’re gorgeous as all hell. Three men were removed from one by police in 2013 for being “too handsome”, and rumours spread that they were threatened with deportation.

Only one of the men involved was identified, poet and model Omar Borkan al Gala, a bona-fide dreamboat. If you vaguely recall being booted out of somewhere a few years ago because too many women were crowding around you, it’s not out of the question you’re one of the other mystery hunks.

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