How to Take Care of a Girl's Appearance on Approaches & Dates

Women care about their appearances more than most men realize. Yet once you know it, you can run better dates and approaches.

In his article on approaching girls in a high energy vs. low energy state, Alek mentioned women’s tendency to put weight on how others make them look in-venue. I thought this was a great topic, and one we haven’t talked about as much as we should have. So today’s article takes that topic and explores it further.

So let’s talk about the importance women place on appearances... both how they look themselves, and how the people and environments they’re associated with make them look.

Different women place different amounts of importance on appearances. Yet everyone values appearances to one extent or another... if not always to the same degrees, or along the same dimensions.

By the end of this article, I hope you will have a better, more intuitive grasp of the importance women put on appearances. And not to worry – we’ll talk below about why this grasp is helpful to your efforts to meet, bed, and date the women you want to do that with, too.

The average man on the street has a much lower regard for appearances than the average female.

He doesn’t care as much about how he presents himself looks-wise (clothes, hairstyle, posture, you name it). He doesn’t care as much how the people he surrounds himself affect others’ impressions of him. He doesn’t care as much about what the places he goes and the activities he participates in tell other people about him. In general, he is just much less concerned what other people think.

This sets up what is often a big disconnect between men and women: women care more about appearances; men less so. So what’s the big deal? you ask. Women like gossip and intrigue and clothes, and men like sports and action and fighting, and no one cares about THAT difference!

Well, that’s true. But when you start to approach new women, you begin to run into this values clash in real world impact. I’ll give you a few examples:

• A girl who is by herself checks you out and gives you a few approach invitations. But you delay approaching her. Later, while she’s surrounded by a group of her friends all chatting her up, you gather the courage to go approach her. You deliver your opener in front of her friends... but she just flashes you a quick, polite smile, then ignores you and returns to her friends. I guess I must have read her wrong, you think.

• You spot a girl you like the looks of in a library. She catches sight of you and smiles. So you bound up to her table and open her in a big, energetic, kinda-loud way: “Hey! I saw you sitting over here and I thought you were just adorable. I’m James!” She gives you a polite hello and a polite smile but won’t give you anything more than one-word answers to whatever you ask. A few times you notice she glances around at the rest of the library. Finally, you decide this isn’t going anywhere and excuse yourself: “All right, well, I’ve got to get going. Enjoy your books!” you say. As you leave, you think to yourself how awkward that was and wonder why she smiled at you if she wasn’t interested.

• You take a girl out on a date. Your initial impression was this girl was definitely into you. She shows up well-dressed; you’re in baggy jeans and a loose fitting t-shirt. You take her to a fast food joint for a burger. After that, you take her down to the boardwalk, where you walk around with her in front of hordes of fit, sexy people in colorful swimwear. Over the course of the date, she withdraws from you more and more. When you go for a kiss at the end of the date, she acts a little grossed out, gives you an awkward smile, and says, “Hey, um, how about we call it a day.” So you walk her back to her car and scratch your head as she drives off, far less excited about you than she was when the date began.
  

If you’re like most guys, you’ve had encounters like these. There’s a fair chance you relate to these experiences, but never paid much attention to how much impact appearances had on the outcome of your encounters. These are all situations where your appearance, and by extension, her appearance when she spends time with you, plays a vital role.

In each of those three scenarios, you put the girl in a delicate situation image-wise, or outright made her look bad:

• You make the girl with friends uncomfortable by approaching her right in front of her friends. You made the faux pas of not approaching her earlier when she was alone and signaled you... instead you waited for a far more inconvenient time to make your approach (you did not approach until she was surrounded by friends). You made the faux pas of approaching her in front of a group of friends when she was otherwise engaged in conversation. And you probably made the faux pas of acknowledging her approach invitation earlier (i.e., with eye contact), waiting to approach, then approaching later without creating some kind of situational excuse for what’s changed and why you’ve now chosen to approach after you declined to before. (If you’re confused about the last one, when people suddenly change their minds about something without a good apparent verbal or nonverbal reason, it flips a big congruence flag in other people’s minds and makes them wonder if you are crazy or on drugs or some other bad thing. In other words, “Why are you acting now in a different way than you acted before?”)
  

• The girl in the library may have hoped you’d come up smoothly and engage her in a quiet, subtle, unnoticeable conversation. Instead you engaged her loudly and obviously, drawing the attention of the entire library to your conversation. Like with the girl surrounded by friends, the pressure is going to be on her to reject you. The larger an audience a woman has, the more likely she is to play it safe, which means rejecting any too-obvious suitors (or, at the very least, putting those suitors through a series of very hard tests, just to show anyone who is watching how picky, high value, and hard won she is).

• And the girl on a date feels embarrassed to have over-dressed compared to you. She feels embarrassed you took her to a fast food joint (especially considering how she’s dressed). If she dresses well, she probably does not appreciate either your poor attire or your unattractive choice of date location. And then you paraded her around in front of scads of more attractive people on the boardwalk, further calling attention both to how over-dressed she is for you (which makes her look like she’s trying hard to impress you) and how poorly dressed you are (which makes her look like she has poor choice in mates, and may actually be low mate value herself if a crummy-looking guy is all she can get).
  

Because men are often much less appearance-focused than women are, and because women aren’t going to tell you you’re making them look bad (most men will either get angry if she tells them this, or dismiss the charge as her imagining things), much of the time when appearance dooms you, not only will you not see it coming... you won’t see it going, either.

You’ll never even know the reason things fell apart was not because she didn’t like you, but because she thought you made her look bad.

Women: Appearance is Sticky

Men and women prefer different mating strategies, and different life strategies.

Women’s life and mating strategies are highly appearance dependent. Consider some common female concerns:

• “I want to look pretty.”
• “I want to look slim.”
• “I want people to think I am [sweet/feisty/cute/fun/nice/feminine/independent].”
• “I don’t want people to think I’m a slut.”
• “People need to think I get high value men.”
• “People need to think men want to commit to me.”
• “If I’m single, people need to think that’s only because I choose to be.”

Men have appearance concerns too. You probably don’t want to seem like a coward or a weakling. Odds are you’d like people to think you’re someone who knows how to win fights, make money, and get laid. You probably want the women you sleep with to think you’re good in bed (also smarter, handsomer, richer, in better shape, and more well endowed than any other man they’ve been with).

But appearance concerns for most men are much less important than they are for most women. For most women, appearance concerns are very important. If appearance gets messed up, she is toast.

For your average guy, appearance getting messed up is good for a laugh. If you buddies see you hook up with a fat girl, lol, oh well. If you get beat up in a fight, yeah, that happens. If you go out to get laid and every girl rejects you, well, can’t get laid every time. Your pals will rag on you a bit, but unless you have big, dramatic long-term trends it doesn’t really matter that much.

For a girl though, one fling with a disgusting guy may ruin her reputation forever. If she tolerates one negative-appearance date and doesn’t throw the guy under the bus for it, everyone’s going to think she has low standards. If she goes out without doing her makeup once, everyone will say, “Ohhh. Actually, she’s not that pretty. It’s all makeup.” And so on and so forth.

We might say that for women, appearance is STICKY.

Women, if appearance was made up of grains of sand.

For men, it is not sticky. Most non-repeating appearance problems for men slide off. You can do a lot of stupid things as a man and not have it impact how other people see you much or at all. Not so for women though.

This awareness in mind, you have three strategies you can pursue with women:

• Make a woman look good, or
• Don’t make her look bad
• Do things in private
  

All three are viable strategies. All three work wonders.

And any of these strategies is light years ahead of what almost any other guy out there does.

Note: you will usually need to learn strategy #2 before you can use strategy #1 well. But let’s talk strategy #1 first before we get to strategy #2.

Strategy #1: Make Her Look Good

The simple way to think about this strategy is to ask yourself what kind of man would make her look good... and then be that man for her.

The more nuanced side is that various kinds of men can make her look good in various ways. For instance, a man who kisses up to a woman and does whatever she asks will always make her look good. But you don’t want to do that, because it makes you look bad, and harms your courtship (probably kill it, actually).

So we should probably actually think about this strategy not as ‘make her look good’ but as ‘make the two of you both look good together’.

A few examples:

• You’re both well-dressed, in good spirits, laughing together, showing mutual amounts of interest in each other, at a cool outdoors café at dusk as pedestrians walk past on the nearby sidewalk

• You’ve gone on a window shopping date, are both dressed attractively casual, and are both having a fun time joking with each other, flirting, and bouncing from store to store

• You’ve met in a bar and since moved to sit. Now there are two attractive, well-dressed people (you and her) seated on a couch in the corner having an intimate conversation. And every guy who looks at you thinks you’ve netted yourself a really cute girl, and every girl who looks at her thinks she’s netted herself a really cute guy

• You’ve met on the sidewalk and moved her to the side, out of the main flow of pedestrian traffic. You look good, she’s enjoying the conversation, you’re showing a suitable amount of interest back in her, and anyone who walks by thinks the two of you make for an attractive couple
  

The keys here are the same in all these scenarios:

• Be attractive
• Dress well (don’t overdress; just dress well)
• Show her a good time: tease her, flirt with her, be playful
• Show her interest back; don’t be a stiff wooden board
• Get her to invest and show interest in you as well
  

But there are a lot of little social nuances that come into play as well. You will often have to think for a woman socially to help find ways that being with you can make her look better.

For instance, on the window shopping date, have her try on some pretty or sexy clothes and compliment her on them when she has them on: “Wow, you look great.” There’ll usually be a few other people around (clerks, other customers, etc.), so your comment makes her look good socially.

On the couch in the bar, the way you have you and her positioned on the couch will have a big effect on how she feels she looks. If you are both awkwardly far apart, and your bodies are not pointed much at one another’s, the social setting acts as amplifier for the awkwardness. What would already be awkward if you and her were alone now becomes downright embarrassing as people mill about and see her in this obviously awkward encounter. The reverse is also true: sit comfortably close to one another, get your and her bodies pointed towards one another, and engage her in an obviously fun conversation where she visibly enjoys herself (either deeply absorbed, or laughing and flirting – either works fine), and now she looks good.

The better you two look together, the better shape you’re going to be in.

Nice guys who haven’t learned to be good with women make the mistake of trying to make the woman look good, at their own expense. That leads them to do things like follow her lead, do what she asks, wait interminably long for her, and pay for everything for her.

Jerks who are better with women yet still missing part of the pie will tend to do things to make themselves look good, at the woman’s expense. So they do things like bust on the girl too hard (i.e., they don’t know when to stop), tease her when they should reward her (e.g., she asks where you live, and rather than tell her, “Not far... we can go there and chill for a bit, come on,” you try to tease her over it: “Oh, trying to seduce me now, huh?”), lock in too hard and leave the girl completely out in space for too long, overuse bored nonverbal behavior or come on too sexually strong, etc.

The way to win with the ‘make her look good’ strategy is to make her look good while you also make yourself look good. The shorthand way to remember that is ‘make us both look good together’.

Strategy #2: Don’t Make Her Look Bad

Our second strategy is arguably easier. And, particularly if you’re focused on quick pickups, this (or Strategy #3... or some combination thereof) is probably where you’ll want to focus your efforts. And, in fact, this strategy (don’t make her look bad) is essentially a prerequisite for the earlier strategy (make her look good)... since it’s hard to make her look good if you also make her look bad. So whichever strategy you prefer, you will want to get this one down first.

All you do when you follow the ‘don’t make her look bad’ strategy is avoid anything that’ll make her look bad. This requires less active planning on your part, and just slightly above average social savvy.

If your social savvy isn’t that above average yet, not to worry; as you spend more time socializing, you’ll refine it more and more.

What you will do with this strategy is to think for the girl, have a basic understanding of how you’ll make her look with any given statement or action, and avoid anything that’ll make her look less than stellar.

If we just look again at our examples near the start of the article, we can see plenty of opportunities to do just this:

• When she gives you an approach invitation, take her up on it soon after. That way you don’t leave her hanging, which can make her look bad

• If she’s engaged with a group of friends, wait to approach until she’s off by herself, the group breaks up, or she rotates a bit out of the group (e.g., she moves away from the circle a bit and is no longer as engaged with the group’s discussion). This way you won’t jump in in the middle of a conversation and put all eyes on her as to her response to you

• When a girl gives you a smile in a public place she’s likely to be self-conscious in (like a library), then be careful to approach her in a smooth, controlled way. To an outside observer, you want it to look like you were someone who already knew her... just very casual, relaxed, unhurried. When you approach this way, you avoid calling the attention of everyone else in the vicinity to your approach (i.e., you avoid an audience)

• If you notice a girl you’re talking with glances about and seems uncomfortable, take her info and get out of there: “Okay, I need to bounce. Let me grab your contact details.” You want to minimize her discomfort, and if your approach makes her self-conscious, you want to make that approach as quick an approach as possible (exception: if you can find another way to alleviate discomfort. e.g., if she’s in a booth at the library and you can just close the curtain. Or, sometimes, you can just ask her to move with you or leave the venue with you)

• Don’t wear anything on a date that might make a girl embarrassed to be seen with you. That includes both anything too dressed down (sweat shirt and sweat pants; baggy jeans and t-shirt) and too dressed up (don’t wear a tux on a date), as well as just generally nutty items (leave your weird-looking hat at home). Don’t take her places that are potentially insulting as date spots. Fast food joints should basically be forbidden from your dates, for instance, unless she’s 200 pounds and loves cheeseburgers

• In the event you are mismatched attire-wise with a girl you take out on a date (it happens; if you dress well, most often you’ll end up in situations where the girl came out very dressed down, while you dressed nice... this can be just as embarrassing for her as when she’s dressed up and you’re underdressed), avoid anywhere very public. Stick to private, quiet, isolated spots, where the two of you can get to know each other, and there won’t be an audience around to make her care about the fact your clothes don’t match (i.e., move to Strategy #3)
  

How do you remember rules like this? How about all the hundreds or thousands of myriad other rules I didn’t mention?

Trial and error. Practice. Empathy. Careful planning. And taking care to review your screw ups when screw ups happen.

I’ve made all these mistakes. I mostly learned not to do them from the sting of rejection + the analysis of what went wrong after. You do something like this, you look back on it, and you say, “Guess I shouldn’t do that with the next girl.” Failure is your fastest way to learn.

Don’t worry too much about what you don’t know yet. This is not a college exam... you’re not supposed to memorize this. The point of this strategy is to know what to look out for, and to start to look for it.

Once you have it in your head that you do not want to make girls look bad, you can begin to review your prior interactions through the filter of, “Did X thing I did make her look bad?”

When you find something that did indeed make her look bad, the lesson’s learned... and you won’t do it next time.

Strategy #3: Do Things in Private

There is also the third strategy: do things in private.

Just don’t have an audience, and she won’t have to worry about what people think of her.

You can’t always do this, or at least you can’t always do it all steps of all courtships. Therefore, its utility as your entire strategy is limited. Sooner or later, you will have to deal with appearances.

However, as a general strategy, where you seek to minimize how public your interactions with her are and to be as discreet as possible, this strategy is fairly ideal. Some examples of the ‘do things in private’ strategy in action:

• You meet her via a quick street stop during day game, and invite her two days later to an evening drink at a quiet little dimly lit dive bar a three-minute walk from your place. After a few drinks in a corner booth away from prying eyes, the two of you leave the mostly-empty bar and head back to your place.

• You meet at a dark house party where everyone is drunk. The two of you have some mutual friends, it seems, but no one is paying attention to you when you meet and you sneak off to somewhere secluded within minutes of meeting each other. Not long after that you slip off to your place or her place, no one else at the party having seen the two of you do anything more than have a brief introductory encounter.
  

• You meet a girl at a martial arts class you take. She was trying out the class and, you guess, probably will only come to one or two classes, like most people who try out your class. You and her chat after that class while everyone else is busy collecting their gear and heading home, and you trade contact info with her quick, then say goodbye. A few days later, she meets you at a café near your house on a day you both have off from work. There’s only one other patron in the café; otherwise you have it all to yourselves. You have a great conversation there and some light snacks, and after 90 minutes you invite her over to relax and watch a movie. She accepts, and the two of you leave the café.
  

The downside to a pure ‘do things in private’ strategy is if you would like to continue to see women after sex, they can be somewhat less likely to agree. If this is the only strategy you use you may have tailored yourself less well to present in public (since you will focus on anonymous pickups and discreet, private dates and sex – no need to worry about making her look good). Yet the more time a woman spends with you the higher the odds are some of that time will include an audience, and she realizes that sooner or later you are going to impact her appearance... one way or the other.

Many talented playboys specialize almost entirely in the ‘do things in private’ strategy and may get quite good at picking up women in, say, dark, anonymous parties or nightclubs for one-night stands, but then have trouble hanging onto them later – a lack of an attractive public appearance is often part culprit for this. If you run into this problem, it’s simple enough to fix: spend a little time on the ‘make her look good’ strategy, and women will want to continue to see you after intimacy, to get those appearance boosts you offer. (for women, “my friends and family will like this guy” can serve as a strong signal of your quality as a longer-term mate, and may push a girl off the fence and get her to keep seeing you)

Girls Care About Appearances

So do you, of course.

But they care about appearances more than you do. While for you, most harm to your appearance rolls off your back, for women appearance damage is sticky. When her reputation gets hurt, it’s a lot more likely to stay hurt. Which makes her a lot more cautious about what reputation risks she opens herself up to.

And that’s okay. Because you can learn to work with and around women’s appearance concerns. In fact, once you’re good at this, you get a strong advantage over less tuned-in men. Because where these guys trip themselves up and make women look bad or don’t make them look good, you can be a breath of fresh air.

To make a girl you’re with look good, you’ll want your focus to be not on making only her look good, but on making you both look good. This will make sure you don’t get into supplication (like nice guys do) while you also avoid the jerk’s “make myself look good at her expense” behavior. The keys to making you both look good include:

• Be attractive
• Dress well (don’t overdress; just dress well)
• Show her a good time: tease her, flirt with her, be playful
• Show her interest back; don’t be a stiff wooden board
• Get her to invest and show interest in you as well

Beyond these basics of making yourself and her look good, you should also look out for social and environmental nuances you can take advantage of to make the two of you look good.

When you go for quick seductions, it’s often easier just to avoid doing anything that makes a girl look bad. For this, you must be attuned to little social rules and how various actions and environments impact women’s images. To a certain extent, you will just have to learn this through trial and error. You’ll talk to a girl, or approach a girl, or take a girl out on a date, and you’ll muck something up. Maybe you’ll recover, or maybe you’ll send the interaction into a death spiral. Either way, you will learn. And with time, you’ll get better and better at not making mistakes that make her look bad.

You should already follow the ‘don’t make her look bad’ strategy before you look to use the ‘make you both look good’ strategy. It’s the more efficient path – ‘make you both look good’ obviously works best once you’re already no longer doing things that accidentally make you or her look bad. Cut out the bad first, then work on the good.

And of course, you can always keep things as quick and discreet in public as possible, to limit the need to worry about appearances and make the courtship purely a ‘you and her’ thing (without the audience).

In the end, regardless the strategy you select, you stand out: as a rare man she can let her ‘appearance guard’ down around; someone she does not have to worry will make her look bad to others and hurt her prospects (unlike so many of bumbling men who approach her)... and perhaps even someone who makes her look outright good.

Chase