Five Surprising Ways Plants Can Make You More Attractive

For instance, you know that sitting in a room full of flowers could make a potential partner more likely to say yes to going on a date with you?

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Sara de los Reyes

July 14, 2021, 01:00 PM

We've all read about how plants make spaces beautiful, but what's lesser known is how plants make us as people more attractive!

Plants have the power to award us with beauty points in more ways than we think, whether it's by communicating that we're caring people or playing on our sense of smell to make us more appealing to a potential significant other, which, if you're asking us, gives us all the more reason to love being a plantita/o.

As we at Metro.Style celebrate beauty month this July, we share four interesting ways leafy plants, herbs, and flowers all play a special role in the attractiveness repertoires of both men and women below!

@boyswithplants

@girlsandplants

Having plants around you conjures up desirable qualities of yours in the minds of others

One thing about being a plantita/o is that it make you looks more attractive, all thanks to how looking like you're a pro at plant care signals that you're a caring, detail-oriented, attentive, and gentle person. Think about it for a second; it naturally follows that someone who's impatient and brash, has little regard for simpler forms of life, and doesn't have it in them to show a tenderness for foliage the same way they would towards, say, a pet or a partner, would be perceived as less attractive to potential mates.

When someone sees you taking the time to shower a cactus with TLC, or nursing a sunburnt philodendron back to its majestic self, don't be surprised to learn that in their minds, they're substituting themselves for your potted pals and imagining what it'd be like to be cared for by you and only you.

More interestingly, this phenomenon could have bigger implications for men. Because plant care and gardening are activities traditionally associated with women—especially if they're done for fun, and not because you have to care for plants in an agricultural sense, lest you starve in the wintertime—women become more attentive to men who unabashedly fill their Instagram feeds with photos of them lovingly tending to their houseplant collection. (If they can care for plants, who's to say that can't take care of a relationship, right?).

It looks like nurturing a green thumb could have positive consequences that extend well outside of the four walls of your green house, after all.

Girls and flowers have always been a perfect combo

We've seen it in art from all over the world, heard/used euphemisms and expressions involving women and blooming flowers, and symbolized a woman's beauty in terms of fresh florals time and time again. For as long as history has recorded and detailed the beauty of a woman, flowers have appeared in narratives as metaphors and comparisons of every kind.

It's a representation that's stood the test of time, and several a researcher have looked into what happens in our brains when we view any kind of image depicting a woman with a flower/flowers. She can be surrounded by them, wearing them, tending to them, or just sitting next to them, but one thing remains constant; the presence of flowers around a woman makes them prettier, as it activates associations of femininity, gracefulness, delicateness, and a softness to one's person that makes a woman, well, appear more womanly.

So ladies, if you're having someone special over for a meal or a housebound date, consider strategically placing a vase of attractive blooms in a place where you'll be spending most of your time in. Or if you're sticking to virtual, COVID-safe dating and/or flirtations, go ahead and post photos of yourself where a stem or two of your favorite flower serve double purpose as your prop for the shot. (No one has to know about your secret ploy).

The presence of flowers is a secret weapon

Surprise! When it comes to making us more attractive, flowers work their magic on men, too. The effect has been empirically backed by two experiments published by a French psychologist in the scientific journal Social Influence, so no, we're not making this up.

The explanation given was that the presence of flowers near you, at least to human beings, conjures up feelings of relaxation (the kind of calmness you feel when you're enveloped in nature and get a whiff of that "green" smell), courtship, and romance. Women especially respond positively to men who they see or have just seen lounging about in a room with flowers around them, the most desirable consequence of which is for men to increase the likelihood a woman will agree to going out on a date with them after women have been exposed to this visual cue.

It's a psychological phenomenon that plays on our modern associations with men and flowers (think: Valentine's Day, weddings, anniversaries, and other such special occasions that have obvious romantic tones to them).

Whoever has said romance and science are mutual exclusive fields needs to rethink their views!

You could literally grow your own skincare

With beauty, it doesn't just mean working to make yourself more marketable to others. Beauty definitely encompasses what you feel about you, and loving the skin you're in. Of course, it's especially challenging if the skin you're in is reactive to irritants, prone to blemishing, and just generally refusing to hit your barefaced beauty goals, but this is another area plants can help you out with!

So many of popular skincare brands today fly off shelves because of claims that they're natural, a.k.a. free of the synthetic bad stuff and packed with the organic good stuff. The thing is, skincare will never not be completely devoid of chemicals, just because it has to survive changes in temperature, being left unused for long periods, and all the other things that could sour an otherwise perfect formula. Well, what if we told you that one of the kindest things you could do to your skin was to finally give it the organic treatment you so badly want for it by supplying yourselves with said organic ingredients?

Hear us out, and give these plants that easily grow (yet pack a punch in terms of skincare) a chance:

Aloe vera: What you want from this succulent is the juicy, jelly-like pulp you can scrape from its leaves. It's best used for reactive skin (read.: skin that, with just one brush against a dusty surface, and it breaks out into scary hives) and burned skin.

Mint: It's not just a toothpaste (or cocktail) flavor. It's an herb that's got a pretty decent amount of salicylic acid, the holy grail contained in most if not all pimple-fighting products. Grow mint in a pot, harvest mature leaves, crush them into a paste, and apply an appropriate amount onto a zit and voila. You have your very own homegrown acne spot treatment.

Rosemary: People with concerns about losing skin elasticity and other signs of aging would do well with having a rosemary oil stash on hand. The process takes a little longer, but you'll thank yourself for giving it a try. What you do is grow a rosemary herb and harvest a mature stem. Put it in a clean jar, fill the jar with olive oil, let it sit for a month, then strain into a container. Most people use the oil as a homemade facemask (you can soak a cotton puff or pad with rosemary oil and apply to areas of concern like eyes, corners of the mouth, or neck).

Bay leaf (known as laurel, locally): Here's a plant for those with hair concerns. If you suffer from a scalp that can't decide whether it's too dry/oily, weak hair follicles, or hair that's way too fine, you can boil bay leaf and use it as a rinse, once or twice weekly. (Others have also made it a facial toner, because it's great a depuffing a face without drying skin out).

Sleep better, wake up fresher

As a last point, we reiterate how beauty isn't just an external thing. You'll have to be kind to your body first, and being a healthy person will have more visible and long-lasting effects, beauty-wise, than any topical skincare product you apply. Sleep is an often neglected form of healthy living with beauty benefits, and as usual, plants play a part in the habit of sleeping better.

If you have trouble getting in the mood for a restful night at a normal hour or just want to improve the quality of your sleep, consider incorporating these plants on a bedside table:

Lavender: Its scent has been used for centuries as a calming agent. Luckily for us, even though the flower doesn't grow in tropical climates, dried lavender's fragrance can be just as potent. (The rest of the plants on this list can be grown locally!).

Peace lily/Snake plant: It's very low maintenance considering the benefits it gives you; it's lauded as a natural air purifier that rids your bedroom of common irritants (e.g.: molds and mite residue, even pollen) that could make you wake up feeling stuffy and looking dreadfully puffy.

Snake plant: These guys also make great air purifiers with an added benefit—they help rid a room of unwanted musky smells for a much more pleasant drifting off into sleep.

Sampaguita, a.k.a. Philippine jasmine: Let it happily sit on your windowsill and allow it to release its signature smell. Its fragrance is said to help in inducing deeper, more restful sleep—perfect if you want to recover from a stressful day or need to be fully energized in the morning.

As a final treat, we're sharing a gallery that perfectly exemplifies what happens when you mix attractive people and an even more attractive plant collection. Scroll through the gallery below to get a dose of some of the most beautiful plantitas and titos we've seen from all over the world!