Science

Pawlowski and Sorokowski^{(1, pdf)} had a sample of Polish men, both rural and urban, rate the attractiveness of the same set of women’s pictures on 5 occasions: 2004 dates were Jan, May, Aug, Oct; 2005 date was Jan.  The images comprised of a woman’s physique whose waist-to-hip ratio was manipulated by digitally altering waist or hip size (woman’s WHR was 0.65), pictures of women’s breasts, and pictures of ordinary faces.

Attwood et al.^{(1, pdf)} investigated how nicotine affects the perceived attractiveness of faces among light smokers, i.e., those not dependent on nicotine.  They had pictures of the faces of young adult men and young adult women judged for attractiveness by lightly smoking male and female college students who had been asked to not smoke for the past day.  Compliance with this requirement was tested by examining the level of carbon monoxide exhaled by the participants before the test.  When the participants were tested, they were either given a regular cigarette to smoke or a nicotine-free cigarette and then they were asked to rate the attractiveness of faces as well as answer some questions about their mood and how irritable they felt.  Neither the participants nor those who administered the tests knew which participant had gotten what kind of cigarette.

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.

I have argued on some occasions that using top-ranked adult actresses and nude models to infer the optimal preferences of heterosexual men is a bad idea.  Here is an upcoming letter in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.  It is a response to an article by Voracek and Fisher (2006) who concluded that heterosexual men prefer more masculine-looking adult actresses compared to nude models, and that these women are often medically underweight.

Here is a news item that has gotten some attention in the mainstream media.  Australian researcher Phillippa Diedrichs conducted a study that found that using very thin women models does not increase the likelihood of women buying the advertised product compared to using women within a healthy weight range.  The study involved making a series of advertisements for underwear, a haircare product and a party dress, modeled by a size-8 woman and a roughly size-12 woman.  See an example below.

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.

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