When you train your body, fix your breathing, eat right, and elevate your testosterone, your face responds. Optimizing your facial traits isn’t vanity—it’s a weapon in a masculine world. Your daily routine shapes your face more than genetics. If you want to maximize facial attractiveness, don’t choose between symmetry and testosterone—optimize both. Facial symmetry is one of the strongest visual cues in sexual selection. While bone structure is largely genetic, some degree of facial asymmetry is influenced by habits, inflammation, posture, and lifestyle. In studies across cultures, symmetrical male faces were rated higher in leadership potential, sexual desirability, and trustworthiness. At Body Symmetry MD, we understand how detrimental the effects of low testosterone levels can be to men who are getting older. These ratios were calculated based on linear distance measurements collected directly on the 3D facial images or through direct anthropometry (see Weinberg et al., 2016 for details). Furthermore, SHBG binds to free circulating testosterone and estradiol and is therefore a good proxy for testosterone levels in the body. Since free circulating testosterone levels are variable and not easy to measure, proxy-measurements have been used to estimate the levels of free testosterone in the human body. SNPs reported to influence testosterone levels in the human body were identified from the literature. Other evidence for the influence of testosterone on facial morphology comes from the craniofacial differences in boys with delayed puberty before and after testosterone treatment. In a study by Marečková et al. (2011), facial appearance was rated to be more masculine in males with a higher level of bioavailable testosterone. In fact, testosterone levels are 20–30 times higher in males than in females during this developmental stage (Duncan et al., 2009). Honest signalling in this case might arise through an immuno-competence handicap mechanism , whereby sex hormones represent a behavioural or immunological handicap to the organism. Similar arguments have been put forward to explain co-variation between trait size and symmetry in birds . We also note that some caution must be taken in interpretation as our symmetry measurements do not all fully fulfil the criteria for fluctuating asymmetry, though appear to mainly capture FA and not DA (see Methods). All images are normalised on inter-pupillary distance to control relative image size, have been made perfectly symmetric, and each high/low pair possesses the average colour information of both. These image pairs were shown to European human participants, who were asked out of the pair which was more typical of their sex in appearance. As feminine facial traits differ less from immature traits than do male traits , they are also potentially less costly to produce. Weaker relationships for symmetry and femininity in females may stem from the fact that the relationship between oestrogen and immuno-competence appears weaker than between testosterone and immuno-competence. Our perceptual test may be biased in examining sex differences as it is dependent on the number of images in the sample. In the additive measures, symmetry was related to dimorphism only for males, but the discriminant measure was related in females. The results here demonstrate that faces are involved in selection with no obvious association with weaponry involved in intra-sexual selection, as shown in previous studies of primate tooth dimorphism. Perceptual differences are then dependent on shape differences between high and low symmetry faces that are independent of symmetry. As a secondary analysis we conducted a discriminant analysis using the four sexually dimorphic measures to discriminate sex of face separately for each face-type. These results indicate that testosterone-related genetic variants affect normal-range facial morphology, and in particular, facial features known to exhibit strong sexual dimorphism in humans. Finally, it is worth noting that sexual dimorphism measured from facial morphology may not capture all visual aspects of sex differences to which humans are optically sensitive. Neither cross-cultural differences in facial shape variation, sex differences in body height, nor differing preferences for facial femininity and masculinity across countries, explain the observed patterns of facial dimorphism. In conclusion, our finding of sex specific co-variation with symmetry, femininity for females, masculinity for males, indicates then that both sexual dimorphism and symmetry likely are signals advertising quality. The interaction reflected that faces that were misclassified according to facial measures demonstrated greater asymmetry than faces that were classified as sex typical (see Figure 2). A univariate ANOVA was conducted with asymmetry as the dependent variable, and face-type (European/Hadza/Macaque), sex (male/female), and classification (male/female) as factors. The features of the individual faces were then morphed to the relevant average shape before superimposing the images to produce a photographic quality result. Colour differences between the images are irrelevant for measurements as they involve only shape information. Any images with asymmetry scores higher than 120 were then excluded from the analysis for all sets. However, if only high quality individuals are capable of bearing the handicap of growing large traits or symmetric traits we would expect size and symmetry of traits to correlate. This correlation between facial morphology and climatic conditions might indicate that facial sexual dimorphism in African tropical and subtropical populations is reduced due to morphological adaptation to climate. Populations with greater sex differences in body size would tend to also have higher levels of facial dimorphism due to allometry. One relevant question is whether these differences in facial dimorphism could be derived from sex differences in body height. People of European origin and South Americans showed a higher level of sexual dimorphism in facial shape compared to people of African origin. Accordingly, body size is strongly related to facial dimorphism in the Brazilian and Colombian samples, while non-allometric variation in SShD contributes to sexual dimorphism especially in the Czech, Turkish, and Colombian samples. Each variant was tested against each of the facial surface modules in a multivariate genetic association-testing framework and meta-analyzed. Facial shape was described using a recently developed extension of the dense-surface correspondence approach, in which the 3D facial surface was partitioned into a set of 63 hierarchically organized modules. In male groups, symmetry often equals silent dominance. Studies in behavioral psychology confirm that symmetrical faces are more likely to receive cooperation and deference from both sexes. In group dynamics, men with high facial symmetry tend to be perceived as leaders—even before speaking.