Finding a Guy Who Looks Like Dear Old Dad - Hot moms and sexual imprinting

"You have such full lips, just like my mom." That pickup line probably won't get a guy many dates--but it's likely to be true. A new study of facial features adds to mounting evidence that a man tends to choose a girlfriend who resembles his mother, and a woman picks a boyfriend who looks like her father.

Men also dated women whose faces more closely resembled their mothers than other women in the study. But here, men seemed to focus on the lower part of the face. The ratios between jaw and face width and lip fullness (height) and width of their mothers and girlfriends tended to match.

These findings hint at a process well documented in animals - and only beginning to emerge from studies of humans - called sexual imprinting. Exposure to adults can bias young animals to pick future mates that resemble their parents.