It’s small, short, and ends in a slight upturn. Often perceived as “cute” or “adorable,” it’s a distinctive feature on a face that makes the person behind it feel approachable.  Put another way, Cruella de Vil didn’t have one.

Perceived as a youthful feature, the distinctive trait can lead to unfair assumptions about a person’s age and experience. Despite one’s actual qualifications, the attribute can make one look younger than their age, and thus may make the owner of one to be perceived as less competent in a leadership or professional setting.

“It” is a upturned nose, also known as a snub or button nose.  Perhaps unconsciously, most of us feel that the owner of such an appealing nose is friendly and agreeable, probably because it is a relatively common facial feature in small, innocent children.

There are many names for this in dogs, including pug nosed, snub nosed, upturned, tip-tilted, button, celestial and pert nosed, but one more word that appears in some encyclopedias of canine terms is “retroussé.”

Not surprisingly, the word is French in origin. “Retroussé” is the past participle of the verb, “retrousser” which mean “to turn up” or “to tuck up” (“re” meaning “back” or “again,” and “trousser” which mean “to fold up” or “to hitch up,”but the full term would be “nez retroussé,” literally meaning “turned-up nose.”  Sources suggest that the word entered English usage around 1830-1840, though the earliest documented use in English appeared in 1802. It became a popular word (if not more elegant than “snub nose”)  to describe an upturned nose shape. The English Toy Spaniel’s nose is an example of a Retroussé nose, and it is described in the breed’s AKC standard as having a deep and well-defined stop, a very short muzzle, and a nose that well laid back and with well developed cushioning under the eyes.

And on the English Toy Spaniel (known in the UK as the King Charles Spaniel), it is utterly charming.

And that’s not just us saying it.

The appeal has to do with “baby schema” or “kindchenschema,”  a set of baby-like features perceived as cute enough to elicit caretaking behavior in humans. The concept originally proposed by ethologist Konrad Lorenz in 1943 has been demonstrably proven in various studies. In 2011, Archer and Monton showed that pictures of dogs with more infantile features were rated as more attractive than those that looked less infantile. In 2015, Hecht & Horowitz systematically manipulated attributes in photographs of dogs’ faces and found that humans preferred features associated with kindchenschema, as well as human-like qualities such as colored irises, and an upturned nose and mouth. And a 2016 study published in Frontiers in Psychology which examined the mechanisms underlying human-animal relationships found that the baby schema affected the perception of cuteness, and thus the attention response to both human and dog faces.

In the end, science suggests that dogs like the English Toy Spaniel are delightful to us because their faces activate brain regions involved in “reward anticipation,” the reward being a hit of Oxytocin, the “feel good” hormone.  Studies have shown that mutual gazing between dogs and humans increases oxytocin levels in both, but there is a reason this happens at all, and that is to trigger caregiving behavior, an important evolutionary function.