I recently received an email listing a number of “Fun Facts”. I doubt the correctness of most of them, but one that jumped out was a claim that women blink nearly twice as often as men.
I wouldn’t be surprised that blink rate is correlated to gender, but a factor of 2 makes me especially suspicious.
I did a search on Google but all I found was hundreds of pages that list various “Fun Facts” like the ones in the email.
Is there a valid scientific source for this? Is it an urban legend? Any thoughts?
I find it SUPER unlikely that your Fun Fact is, in fact, a fact (fun though it may be), as I can’t think of a reason why women would blink more; I really doubt that women have drier eyes.
The only thing I could come up with would be something to do with makeup irritating the eyes, so that women wearing eye liner, eye shadow, or mascara would be blinking more to get rid of foreign particles that fell into their eyes. Which is still a big, BIG stretch. Never mind the fact that many women don’t wear eye makeup.
But it would be neat to test the hypothesis, if anyone can manage to watch people blink without the subject knowing it.
Point of interest for Qis: My eye doctor tells me that you blink less frequently when you’re looking at a computer screen. So your results might be a little skewed if you’re looking at your computer when the webcam thingy records your blinks. But, I’d say it’s worth trying anyway.