DRINKING alcohol does not give you beer goggles, scientists say.
A US study found boozing does not make people look more attractive, but it does give you “Dutch courage”.
Men were 71 per cent more likely to want to interact with people they thought were good-looking after having the equivalent of a bottle of beer, researchers found.
Dr Michael Sayette, of Stanford University, said: “The well-known beer goggles effect of alcohol does sometimes appear in the literature but not as consistently as one might expect.”
The NHS recommends Brits don’t drink more than no more than 14 units of alcohol — the equivalent of six pints of beer — a week, spread across three days or more.
Previous research has shown drinking alcohol can make you less fussy about who you fancy, but has focused on asking participants to rate pictures of people.
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The latest study, published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, looked at people’s actual intentions to see if this was really the case.
Researchers asked 36 men in their 20s about their dating opinions after being given enough alcohol to meet the US driving limit — 0.8 per cent in blood or around 330ml of beer.
They were asked to rate the looks of people they viewed in photos and videos.
Participants were told that they may be given the opportunity to interact with one of those people in a future experiment.
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After providing attractiveness ratings, they were asked to select those who they would most like to meet.
The same questions were posed to them on another occasion when they were given a drink with no alcohol in it.
While drinking had no impact on how attractive they found people, they were more likely to want to meet those they found more attractive.
When drinking, they were 1.71 times more likely to select one of their top-four attractive candidates to potentially meet in a future study compared with when they were sober.
However, researchers warned the boost in confidence could be damaging in the long-term.
Dr Molly Bowdring said: “Drinkers may benefit by recognising that social intentions change when drinking in ways that may be appealing in the short term but possibly harmful in the long term.”
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