But many beauty biases at the office are no more than mental short cuts. The same way that shoppers are constantly hunting for clues that certain products are a good deal because we don't know the true value of anything (look at that discount! it's so much cheaper than that similar-looking thing!), managers and employees, who can't fully know the true potential of their peers, are bound to use short cuts to guess who's competent. Comely women and confident men might not exude PowerPoint skills in their waist-to-hip or facial width-to-height ratios, but comeliness and confidence are easy clues to pick up, which means they begin to inform our opinion of people before we're even aware that we're forming an opinion. After all, the first draft of our first impressions are sealed after as little as 13 milliseconds. Once you realize that, it's amazing we're not even more biased.