Abstract: Facial attractiveness is important in delivering social affective information. The judgment of facial attractiveness can be influenced by factors such as facial averageness, symmetry, sexual dimorphic feature. In recent years, research of facial attractiveness have been expanded to the dynamic faces. And by adopting functional MRI (fMRI) researchers have discovered that the amygdale, the orbit frontal cortex, the ventral occipital region and other brain regions were activated when subjects are asked to rate the attractive faces. Researchers have explained why attractive faces are preferred from evolutional and cognitive view. Several limitations existed in the previous research’s content, material and subjects, which exactly the direction of future research.

Key words: facial attractiveness, averageness, symmetry, sexual dimorphic feature, reward value