Drinking alcohol or even the mere expectation of being tipsy is enough to make a person feel more attractive, scientists revealed.

Unfortunately the effects of alcohol are purely in the mind of the drinker, and other people do not find them any more appealing, according to new research.

French and Dutch researchers asked 19 men and women drinking at a French bar to rate their own attractiveness and blow into a breathalyzer.

They found that the more participants drank, the more attractive they perceived themselves to be, according to the study published in the Journal of Individual Differences.

Researchers then conducted a second experiment consisting of 86 young men who were told they were taking part in a taste test for a new minty lemon drink and found that just thinking of alcohol is enough to boost a person's opinion of themselves.

Researchers gave some participants an alcoholic version of the drink and others the same drink without the alcohol. In both groups, some participants were told that the drink was alcoholic while others were told that it was alcohol-free.

Participants were then asked to take a short break to allow the alcohol to take its effect by watching a short advertisement for the fictional drink.

Researchers then asked participants to rate their own attractiveness and found that those who thought they were drunk rated themselves to be more attractive than the others, regardless of whether they had actually had any alcohol.

In a third experiment, researchers found that the new-found sexiness after alcohol was only an illusion of the person drinking because when researchers played recordings of participants in the previous experiment to a panel of university students, they were sorely unimpressed.

Researchers believe that the beer-goggle effect may be associated with a person's memories of glamorous film stars like 007 agent James Bond sipping on alcoholic drinks, which leads people to associate drinking with attractiveness.

"Almost everyone thinks they are more attractive after they think they have consumed alcohol," lead researcher Laurent Begue of the University of Grenoble in France said in the paper.

"However, ratings from independent judges showed that this boost in self-evaluation was unrelated to actual performance," he added.

The latest study adds to past research into the "beer goggle effect" that people generally see others as more attractive after drinking.

However, results from the current study suggest that beer goggles can also work in reverse.

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