Aesthetics

Is this the most attractive torso in women?

This is a rough sketch of the average torso of a sample of adult women that was found most attractive in a study by Donohoe et al.^{(1, pdf)}, more attractive than the average torsos of “super attractive” women such as Playboy centerfolds, high-fashion models from the 1920s and 1930s and high class Australian prostitutes/escorts.

This study employed a different methodology from most studies in the genre to date.  The authors produced sketches of torsos with random combinations of shoulder, waist and hip widths – all widths found within samples of ordinary women – and had sets of images rated for attractiveness by male students.

Rilling et al.^{(1, pdf)} had male and female judges rate the attractiveness of women’s bodies in front, side and back views as well as a short video clip of women’s bodies rotated in space.

The stimulus set comprised of young adult women with a body mass index (BMI; a measure of how much weight a given height carries or weight divided by the square of height) between 18 and 24.

The authors found that waist depth, shown below, was an important predictor of women’s attractiveness.

Waist depth.

People have been describing the ideal length of the head (top of head to bottom of chin) or face height (from hairline to bottom of chin) in relation to standing height since at least Classical Greece.  In the fifth century B.C., the Greek sculptor Polycleitus of Argos described some aesthetic proportions in The Canon of Polycleitus and illustrated it with a bronze statue of the Canon or Doryphorus (Spear bearer).  The Roman marble copy of Doryphorus is shown below.  The height of Doryphorus is 7.5 times the head length.

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.

Here are two studies on cross-cultural comparisons.

Two studies follow.

Springer et al.^{(1, pdf)} showed the following noses individually to 308 judges and asked them to judge whether they belong to women or men.  Each of the four images shows the average of a sample of men or women, none of whom were the judges.

One point that has repeatedly come up in this site’s criticism is that beauty standards fluctuate greatly, an alleged example being that overweight women were preferred in medieval Europe.  Just about everyone points out Peter Paul Rubens’ paintings featuring obese women.  What did medieval Europeans prefer in women’s looks?