Readers brought these two examples to my attention.

I came across an excellent resource that graphically illustrates the path taken by humans to attain their present form, and we can infer how our sense of facial attractiveness has transformed.  This in the form of a book, “The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty Two Species of Extinct Humans.”  It does a great job of putting a face on ancestral species leading to modern humans.  This book illustrates meticulous reconstructions of fossils.  An example of a Homo heidelbergenis reconstruction is shown below.

National Geographic currently has a feature on Neanderthals, a human species that flourished from 175,000 – 27,000 years before present in mostly Europe and to some extent the Middle East.  The feature centers on a fossil reconstruction of a Neanderthal woman.  Many bony parts, including the skull, come from those of an actual Neanderthal female, and feminized versions of bone remains of a Neanderthal male were used to complete the skeleton.  Muscles were added in accordance with the markings on the bones indicating points of attachment of muscles and the size of muscles.  The pigmentation is the best guess of the reconstruction team.  Genetic analyses have revealed that some Neanderthals had pale skin and red hair.

The clowns at CNN recently released a video on whether thin is still in in the fashion world.

This article addresses two papers on the attractive form of the umbilicus in women.

Here is a novel approach to generating more attractive faces using a computer, though the morphing methodology used leaves much to be desired.  The article is by Wong et al.^{(1, pdf)}

Potter and Corneille came up with the following study:^{(1, pdf)}

Abstract: Face attractiveness relates positively to the mathematical averageness of a face, but how close attractive faces of varying groups are to their own and to other-group prototypes in the face space remains unclear.  In two studies, we modeled the locations of attractive and unattractive Caucasian, Asian, and African faces in participants’ face space using multidimensional scaling analysis.  In all three sets of faces, facial attractiveness significantly increased with the absolute proximity of a face to its group prototype.  In the case of Caucasian and African faces (Study 1), facial attractiveness also tended to increase with the absolute proximity of a face to the other-group prototype.  However, this association was at best marginal, and it became clearly non-significant when distance to the own-group prototype was controlled for.  Thus, the present research provides original evidence that average features of faces contribute to increasing their attractiveness, but only when these features are average to the group to which a face belongs.  The present research also offers further support to face space models of people’s mental representations of faces.

When I heard that a fashion model fell to her death in New York City, apparently committing suicide, the first thing that came to my mind was murder even though I didn’t know who this model was and the exact circumstances of her death.  This is a reasonable a priori assumption.  After all, New York City, one of the headquarters for organized international crime, has a very large number of criminal lowlife.  After reading about how Ruslana Korshunova died, I’d bet she was murdered.

This site has received a big makeover.  Here are some reasons why and an explanation of the changes.

A video featuring ‘fat-legged’ Ali Michael on MSNBC and a discussion of her disordered eating behavior in the current edition of Teen Vogue is featured below.