Individual life experiences, such as the appearance of a first boyfriend or girlfriend, determine who we find attractive later on, a new study has found.
The finding that our individual circumstances and experiences determine attraction suggests that everyone really does have a "type" of person that they are attracted to.
Researchers tested 761 identical and non-identical twins, who were asked to rate the attractiveness of 200 photographed faces.
Researchers concluded that whether or not someone is "your type" is largely the result of unique personal experience rather than genes, 'The Times' reported.
"If you think about your first romantic relationship, that person's face, or someone who looks like them, might be attractive to you for years to come," said Laura Germine, a psychologist who co-led the study at Massachusetts general hospital in Boston.
In the study, more than 35,000 volunteers visited the website TestMyBrain.Org, which enabled researchers to develop a test of the uniqueness of an individual's facial preferences.
They then tested the preferences of 547 pairs of identical twins and 214 pairs of same-sex, non-identical twins, by having them rate the attractiveness of 200 faces.
The researchers found that only limited notions of beauty, such as symmetry, are universal and may be hard wired into our genetic make-up.
"Individual aesthetic face preferences are truly shaped primarily by individual life experiences," researchers said.
The study is published in the journal Current Biology.
