Do women really marry men who look like their fathers? Judge for yourself in our slideshow

“Daddy’s girls” who had close relationships with their fathers as children tend to be attracted to men who look like them when they grow up, according to research.

A father’s facial appearance can have a profound influence over the looks that his daughters seek in their boyfriends or husbands, but only if the two formed a strong emotional bond early in life, British and Polish scientists have found.

While folk wisdom and several previous studies have suggested that women tend to be drawn towards men who resemble their fathers, the new study offers evidence that this is not an inevitable process but depends on the quality of the paternal relationship.

The link applied only when father and daughter were particularly close. Women who reported negative, neutral or even slightly positive bonds were no more likely to favour men resembling their fathers than anyone else.

The phenomenon appears to hold for several celebrity relationships. Nigella Lawson, the cookery writer, Zoë Ball, the broadcaster, Gwyneth Paltrow, the actress, and Stella McCartney, the designer, have all married men with a passing facial resemblance to their fathers.

The findings emerged from a study of 49 heterosexual Polish women, in which psychologists compared detailed measurements of their fathers’ faces and those of unknown men, whom the subjects picked as particularly desireable from a choice of 15.

The men’s hair, ears, neck, shoulders and clothing were not visible, so that the women could not see socially conditioned aspects of appearance such as pierced ears or hair-styles, and focused on their physical features alone.

When the women were assessed as a group, there was no correlation between fathers’ faces and those of the potential sexual partners that were chosen. Among those who rated their paternal bond particularly positively in a questionnaire, however, there was a significant link.

A similarity to the father’s central facial features, the nose, eyes and eyebrows, was particularly likely to make men appear attractive to this group of women. The researchers have yet to investigate whether heterosexual men who were close to their mothers in childhood also prefer similar women, but they said they expected that a similar effect would apply.

Lynda Boothroyd, of the University of Durham, who led the study, which is published in the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour, said the results suggested that people’s ideals of an attractive face could be “imprinted” at an early age by the faces they see most often – those of their parents.

Dr Boothroyd said: “These controlled results show for certain that the quality of a daughter’s relationship with her father has an impact on whom she finds attractive. It shows our human brains don’t simply build prototypes of the ideal face based on those we see around us, rather they build them based on those to whom we have a strongly positive relationship. We can now say that daughters who have very positive childhood relationships with their fathers choose men with similar central facial characteristics to their fathers.”

Dr Boothroyd highlighted Ms Lawson’s father, Lord Lawson of Blaby, the former Chancellor, who bears a striking resemblance to Charles Saatchi, the advertising executive who is her second husband.

Ms Ball’s husband, the DJ Norman Cook, has some facial similarities to her father, Johnny Ball, the children’s televi-sion presenter. Ms Paltrow’s husband, the Coldplay singer Chris Martin, has facial features very similar to those of her father, Bruce Paltrow. Ms McCartney’s husband, Alasdhair Willis, somewhat resembles Sir Paul McCartney.

The actress Angelina Jolie is a counter-example. Although she was estranged from her father, the actor Jon Voight, as a girl, she has since had relationships with men who bear him a passing resemblance – Brad Pitt and Billy Bob Thornton.

Times Recommends

• Oh no, Mr Darling: you have failed
• BBC survives dogfight over Kennel Club expose
• Where the Rosetta belongs can’t be set in stone