Halo effect

The halo effect is a cognitive bias, first described by Edward Thorndike in 1920, in which a positive impression of one attribute raises judgements of unrelated attributes. Applied to faces it means an attractive person tends to be rated as more competent, more trustworthy and more sociable than the evidence supports. The effect is genuine and has replicated widely, and it is the actual mechanism the whole appearance-improvement category points at. It is also routinely oversold: effect sizes in the literature are moderate, they shrink sharply once a rater has any real information about the person, and the specific numbers that circulate online — a percentage more likely to be hired, a salary figure — are almost always traceable to a marketing page rather than a study. Treat it as a real thumb on the scale, not as a mechanism you can operate.