Although personal taste has a major influence on our fashion world, we make sure we don’t look smaller or fatter than we are. Well indeed Do diagonal lines make us fatter than we are?

Instead of sticking to these generalizations floating around individual preferences when choosing clothes and it will always be more important to think about comfort. But if it reassures you: yes, this is just an illusion.

Scientist Hermann von Helmholtz made an interesting observation when he investigated the effects of lines on perception.

Before we all ponder Helmholtz’s statement, let’s filter it through the mind. We thought that a square of the same size looks wider with horizontal lines and longer with vertical lines, right? Then you were initially eliminated. Because The opposite was observed in Helmholtz’s study. This is today “Helmholtz illusion” It was called.

According to Helmholtz Horizontal lines that filled a square made the square appear longer. However, Helmholtz did not test this experiment on real people. What do you think happened after this investigation?

It turned out that the square with horizontal stripes was perceived as 14% longer than its actual size, while the square with vertical stripes was perceived as 4.06% wider than its actual size!

The intention was to conduct a series of studies on this topic in the next phases. Unfortunately, however, there is currently no consensus among scientists. in 2009 British psychologists Peter Thompson and Kyriaki Mikellidouconducted a study on this topic using three-dimensional female models.

In this study participants They compared 200 photos of women wearing horizontally and vertically striped dresses. and they noticed which woman looked fatter. The result of the study that wanted to test whether the illusion we mentioned was real or just an illusion was very surprising. Because it was found that in two women of the same size, the one who wore a horizontal striped dress looked slimmer.

In 2011, psychologists from the University of York investigated whether this illusion applies to everything.

Researchers first investigate the illusion tested it on a three-dimensional cylinder. Realizing that the findings were the same, they decided to perform the experiment on clothing this time. Two lifeless mannequins were dressed in horizontally or vertically striped clothing. The results showed that in both cases the area covered by vertical lines was perceived as larger than the areas covered by horizontal lines of the same size.

If you thought the work on this topic was over, think again. Because it was thought that there might be something wrong with this issue, further investigation was conducted. Researchers noted a shortcoming in previous studies and This time they decided to mix things up a bit.

The models used in previous experiments were copies of each other, but the people were not identical.

Because previous experiments were conducted on humans and mannequins with the same body, it was thought that this might be an illusion. That’s why in these experiments thin, thin, tall, fat; that is, they used models with different body types. And here an interesting situation arose.

Slim models looked even slimmer in horizontally striped clothes, ie Helmholtz illusion So it was confirmed. However, the same was not true for overweight models. In fact, line type did not have much effect on overweight models.

So when choosing clothes, you no longer have to worry about horizontal stripes making you look too heavy. conventional wisdom It does not always give the right result!

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