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Before The Hunger Games made Young Adult dystopian literature “The Hot Thing” of the 2010s, there was Scott Westerfield’s Uglies. In the book, a dystopian society raises children separately from their parents with one goal in mind: to make them beautiful. Teenagers in Uglies are reshaped from their ugly (read: average looking) selves and turned into Pretties, hyper-beautiful elites whose only purpose in life is to live in a constant state of bliss.
The chances of our world becoming like that are fortunately far-fetched. However, far-fetched doesn’t mean “no chance at all.” The hyper-competitive culture of South Korea doesn’t restrict itself to intense study routines but stretches into the East Asian country’s idea of beauty, creating a culture of “외모지상주의” or lookism and a rise in eating disorders among teenage girls.
If you’re a decent person, which I assume you are, your first instinct is likely to assure someone that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and “it’s what’s on the inside that counts.” For the most part, that’s true. Most beauty trends are just trends and knowing someone has a good personality has been shown to make them more attractive in our eyes.
That being said, some fundamental aspects of physical beauty tend to be shared between cultures leading to the conclusion that they’re the closest thing you can get to a universal idea of beauty.
It’s all thanks to evolution.
What Makes Someone Beautiful?
The human brain is extremely attuned to seeing faces and understanding facial impressions. It’s why you sometimes see faces on objects like power plugs and clouds. This evolutionary skill was developed to help us get around in increasingly complex human societies and, on a baser level, to help us find a mate. This isn’t to say that reproduction is all there is to attractiveness as the researchers concede that it’s an overly simplistic way to approach beauty. It’s just that there are near-universal criteria that affect how and why we perceive someone as attractive that are consistent within and between cultures.
Let’s have a look at a few of them.
1. Being Young
This one’s a no-brainer. While we have men, women, and non-binary people of culture who like the odd silver fox, you’ve likely noticed that their favorites are almost always people who have aged gracefully and don’t look as old as the average person in their age bracket.
We tend to love youthful faces because we perceive them as energetic and healthy. This is especially true for women. As Marilyn Monroe put it, “Don’t you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty?”
A woman’s perceived attractiveness declines sharply after she hits menopause thanks to male perceptions of a lack of fertility. Conversely, older men can retain their attractiveness due to female perceptions of accumulated resources and status. So while aging can actually help a man appear more handsome, if you’re a woman, well, tough luck.
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2. A Symmetrical Face
Another thing people look for as a sign of a good mate is a proportionate face. While certain facial features like high-bridged noses and double eyelids are subjective, the attractiveness of symmetrical faces is not. Composites of attractive faces were seen as more attractive than composites of average faces, even though composites as a whole tend to be seen as beautiful because they average out people’s facial features.
When asked why they found composites of attractive faces more beautiful, participants couldn’t tell why they were drawn to the composite in the first place, suggesting that our ability to recognize facial symmetry isn’t always conscious.
Another unconscious process in the perception of attractiveness is the way we assess beauty through a person’s eyes. Eye recognition is processed in the amygdala, the part of the brain where we feel our feelings.
Okay, but what about people like Natalie Dormer whose permanently crooked smile, thanks to an asymmetrical mouth, has earned her a spot in many people’s “this is hot” list?
Turns out, while we like average features, exaggerating some key facial features tends to make people even more attractive. It’s called a “signal shift” and it makes a face stand out to our brains. Regardless of her crooked smile, remember that Dormer is still conventionally attractive as more extreme exaggerations of the face quickly go from quirky to ugly.
3. A Proportionate Body
If you’re a firm believer that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes, you might find this a little distasteful.
People judge reproductive fitness, that is, if you’re physically fit enough to have kids, based on your body proportions. For women, the ideal waist to hip ratio is 0.7 while for men, it’s 0.9. In non-numeric terms, that’s broad shoulders for the guys and big hips for the gals. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “That’s just diet culture teaching people that they should find certain body types more attractive.”
Yes, but also no. The study found that these bodily proportion preferences develop early in life. Children as young as 3 years old tend to pick proportionate bodies over less proportionate ones.
What about BMI or body mass index, then? Apparently, waist to hip ratios aren’t perceived separately from BMI and, often, it even proved to be a better indicator of perceived attractiveness than waist to hip ratio.
What counts as an attractive BMI varies more between cultures as Asians and Caucasians stick to the lower end of the scale while African populations go for BMIs that are slightly higher. Still, there isn’t a big difference, In all of the populations researched, the peak physical attractiveness for BMI was as low as 19.
To give you an idea of how low that is, Playboy models over the past 50 years had BMIs between 17 to 20.
4. Small Feet
When it comes to beauty, even the smallest changes can affect how other brains perceive your body.
Did you know that women’s feet grow by anywhere between 2 to 10 millimeters after childbirth? Well, “grow” is a bit misleading since the increase in length is due to the reduced height of women’s foot arches. It’s a minuscule change, but it’s big enough that it signals aging. Women with smaller feet, on the other hand, “signal youth and untapped reproductive potential”.
Though both men and women preferred men to have feet proportionate to their height, they also liked women with disproportionately smaller feet more. Put a woman in high-heeled shoes and her feet instantly look smaller as the heel height forces her foot’s arch up.
This strangely specific phenomenon might explain the brutal practice of foot binding and even fairytales. Uhm, hello, Cinderella? Her feet were canonically so small that her shoes couldn’t fit anyone else in the kingdom.
5. Clear Skin
Before Dove shows up and promises to give us whiter, smoother skin, let’s get this one out of the way first: skin color has nothing to do with the attractiveness factors of the skin.
Instead, what we do find universally attractive is a consistent skin tone. That means minimal blemishes and discoloration. This is because discoloration is seen as a sign of declining health. Wrinkles are also a no-go because of the fact that it develops as we age and you know how it is: age means loss of fertility. Loss of fertility is apparently not sexy.
How sensitive are we to health and age signals on the skin? Findings showed that we can tell how old someone is based on just a cropped picture of their cheek.
It Gets Worse — We Think We’re Hotter Than We Really Are
You might not be feeling too great about your looks already so, to add insult to injury, consider this: you aren’t aware of just how unattractive you are.
A recent study with the scathing title of “Unattractive people are unaware of their (un)attractiveness” found that people are prone to overly positive self-perceptions, especially when they’re comparing their current selves to their past selves. They also tend to rate their positive traits as better compared to the average person. As if it couldn’t get any worse, people also believe they’re less likely to be biased in their self-assessment than the average person.
Go figure.
It seems there’s a Dunning-Krueger effect for perceptions of beauty because while unattractive people see themselves are more attractive, attractive people see themselves as less attractive. On a positive note, most people tend to be aware of when they’re being biased in their self-assessments so don’t feel too upset.
If you are, though, I can’t blame you. No one likes feeling ugly, let alone reading an article that tells them they’re uglier than they think they are and culture isn’t entirely to blame. But don’t lose all hope yet. Just because you aren’t a calendar model doesn’t mean you can never snag the partner of your dreams (or get some).
Despite its universal features, attractiveness is still affected by factors that you can control. Inspiring feelings of gratitude and similarity can make the person you like like you back. Take note of similarity because sharing beliefs, hobbies, and socioeconomic backgrounds can increase your chances of landing a date. In addition to beauty not being in the eye of the beholder, opposites do not, generally, attract.
If you want to be more attractive to that special someone without having to go full Arya Stark and replace your face, check out Want Someone to Like You Back? Reciprocal Attraction Might Be Your Best Bet.
