Who needs mistletoe?

Wondering what to wear at the holiday party to lure a new love for '09? That expensive, sequiny dress? A handsome new holly-green vest and some knock-'em-dead after-shave? Too bad fashion writers don't read science journals. Instead of just lecturing on clothing, perfume and makeup, they could draw on research from human mating for their tips on boosting one's attractiveness at holiday parties -- ones that don't involve buying a thing.

Details such as the color of the walls, who you stand next to, whether the crab cakes at the buffet run out early -- strange to say -- may change how others perceive us in small (yet potentially useful) ways. "People are differentially attractive under different circumstances," says David M. Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin and author of "The Evolution of Desire." So we trawled the scientific journals to find holiday party mating strategies that draw upon this fact. Here are the fruits: arcane tips for maximizing your irresistibility at parties this month, no expensive bling required. (Apologies to some up front: Most of the experiments we found focus on the attractiveness of heterosexual women.)

--

Party pointers

Hang out by the spiked eggnog bowl.

"The world -- or at least people in it -- looks better after a couple of drinks," says Marcus Munafo, a professor of biological psychology at the University of Bristol in England. In a study published in the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism, Munafo and colleagues invited 84 college men and women into a lab for a happy-hour "beer goggles" experiment. Half of the participants got a strong vodka and tonic (equivalent to a couple of beers or a large glass of wine); the rest got a look-alike straight-tonic placebo.

Men who got the vodka rated photographs of women's faces as more attractive than did non-drinking men. Likewise, drinking women scored men's faces higher than did sober women. The next day, the boozy effects had faded -- except for men's rating of women, which remained high.

Why it might work: Alcohol changes how we perceive facial symmetry. In a study in a Brazilian bar, men and women, when drunk, had a harder time spotting small deviations of symmetry in pictures of geometric shapes.