Oaky, here’s the cynical answer: People are liars. If there’s anything about you that other people are “meh” about, they will compliment you because they think they “need” to.
Here’s a true story: I attended some kind of a group activity once, many years ago. At the beginning, everyone introduced themselves. Now people don’t usually go making personal comments about other peoples’ names.
But we had one girl in the group named Gretchen. To be sure, this may be a perfectly cromulent name in certain European cultures. But in America (and I suspect, in English-speaking places in general), I think the name tends to grate on the ears a little. Or maybe a lot.
So, this girl introduces herself as Gretchen. And TWO other people in the group, both female, spoke up with words to the effect: “Oh, what a lovely name.”
Now why would they have made it a point to speak up and say anything at all? I think the message really was: “Oh, that’s such an ugly name that I need to be your Hero and tell you how lovely it is so you won’t feel so awful about having such an ugly name.”
How often do you suppose Gretchen hears someone tell her how lovely her name is? I’ll bet it’s often.
I wear a bow tie. Chicks dig a bow tie.
I need to do something to stand out, otherwise I am just another boring, balding, potato-like middle aged man on the street.
(I also own a few fedoras. Not trilbys. Real fedoras, with a real brim, just like God and Bogart intended.)
Hats are a tricky area. I’ve got a couple of fedoras (black with gray band, gray with black band, so pretty standard). This comes across as an affectation to so many, but the truth is in Chicago you often need a hat and with business wear a baseball cap (especially backwards) or ski cap look peurile, and don’t even start me on the folks with Elmer Fudd hats in suits.
So about half the comments I get are genuine pleasant surprise that a fedora looks good, and half are along the lines of “only old men should wear those” or “ohhhh - you wear hats, huh? Interesting” (i.e, check out the weirdo).
I’m guessing you don’t intend to sound so self-righteous, but you sure come across that way.
As long as people are selective about whose opinions they rent headspace to and how frequently they do it, there is nothing wrong with caring what other people think. Individuals who care what other people think, within moderation, have friends and partners (like you yourself apparently have). They get hired for jobs and get promoted. They are less likely to be moping around, wondering why no one likes them.
Compared to the norm, I don’t care what people think all that much, at least when it comes to my physical appearance. My insecurities tend to run deeper. However, when the governor paid a surprise visit on us a few weeks ago and he paid me a compliment, I squealed like a little girl. I told everyone I know what the governor told me. So what do you know, I guess I do care what “people” think!
It’s okay to be this superficial sometimes.
People are motivated to do things that seem to matter. One of the reasons stuff like personal appearance gets dismissed by certain groups (engineering, linux, programming, work from home, etc) is because much of what they do for work/fun is very concrete and they see many things in a binary sense. The way you look isn’t relevant to them or their work and thus they don’t think it should be relevant at all.
On the other extreme you have the very slick salesman type whose emphasis is on a person’s impression of their work, taking advantage of the subjective nature of people’s attitudes. These folks place great effort in appearance because they believe it carries much more weight than the actual product.
Realistically we should be somewhere in between because while in theory looks shouldn’t matter, we can’t always rely on living in a vacuum where the personal perception of the person hiring you/manager/peers never matter; similarly not everyone is going to be fooled by good posture and a silver tongue if you’ve got nothing tangible to show for it.
Its just a matter of preference. I’ll always have my hair the same way (curled and dyed black) so can’t say much on hair. But yes I’ve found I’ll wear something I think is causal and I’ll have compliments asking why I look so nice today @: I get dressed up and nada.
As long as you look in the mirror and think you look beautiful and feel good about yourself that’s all that really matters.
This. If I get more than one or two compliments on something, I quit wearing it.
Recently, I got a bad haircut and two of my co-workers told me it was nice, but they liked it better before…which I reckon is as close as they can politely get to saying they hate it.
I had an outfit that I used to wear often because of the compliments I got whenever I wore it. It wasn’t anything that I considered special. It was just a specific pair of Khaki pants paired with a specific scoop necked silk tee shirt.
No one ever complimented the actual outfit but whenever I wore it I got LOTS of “You look great today” “Have you been working out?” " Have you lost weight?" type compliments.
So I figured that the outfit was extremely flattering and I started wearing it a lot.
I genuinely like that name and if I told someone it was lovely I would mean it 
I’m trying to think if I’m guilty of complimenting as a way to acknowledge something I actually think is ugly and I don’t think I do that… If someone is wearing something truly hideous I won’t say anything, if they’re wearing something odd I might remark on the item (“where’d you get that necklace?”) but I enjoy when people wear unusual things even if they don’t totally pull it off so if I pay a compliment I mean it.