Previous research has identified facial averageness and sexual dimorphism as important factors in facial attractiveness. The averageness and sexual dimorphism accounts provide important first steps in understanding what makes faces attractive, and should be valued for their parsimony. However, we show that they explain relatively little of the variance in facial attractiveness, particularly for...

Previous research has identified facial averageness and sexual dimorphism as important factors in facial attractiveness. The averageness and sexual dimorphism accounts provide important first steps in understanding what makes faces attractive, and should be valued for their parsimony. However, we show that they explain relatively little of the variance in facial attractiveness, particularly for...

Modern society places strong emphasis on physical attractiveness and facial beauty. The face is thought to be an important feature in the determination of human physical attractiveness [1]. Over the years there were significant changes in the standard of facial esthetic, so orthodontists must be updated about what the population considers an ideal face [2]. From the patient’s point of view, est...

We showed that the looking time spent on faces is a valid covariate of beauty by testing the relation between facial attractiveness and gaze behavior. We presented natural scenes which always pictured two people, encompassing a wide range of facial attractiveness. Employing measurements of eye movements in a free viewing paradigm, we found a linear relation between facial attractiveness and gaz...

Evolutionary theory based research shows that attractiveness is based on biological correlates that index appropriate estrogen and testosterone levels. Symmetry affects or plays a role in the perception of many of these correlates of attractiveness. Additionally, since attractiveness affects infidelity perception and reactions, sexual satisfaction, and personality perception, symmetry also affe...

a r t i c l e i n f o Faces capture cognitive resources, and more attractive faces capture more resources. But to be of adaptive value this proportionality should be modulated by properties of the perceiver, including their own level of attractiveness. Here we investigated the allocation of central processing resources for perceivers at different levels of mating market value (high, low) in res...

Previous studies have suggested that female facial attractiveness is associated with exaggerated sex-specific facial traits and averageness. Here we applied geometric morphometrics, a method for multivariate statistical analysis of shape, to measure geometric averageness and geometric sexual dimorphism of natural female face profiles. Geometric averageness and geometric sexual dimorphism correl...

Common maxims about beauty suggest that attractiveness is not important in life. In contrast, both fitness-related evolutionary theory and socialization theory suggest that attractiveness influences development and interaction. In 11 meta-analyses, the authors evaluate these contradictory claims, demonstrating that (a) raters agree about who is and is not attractive, both within and across cult...

The proposition that universal standards of female beauty reflect adaptations for reproductive value assessment does not preclude cross-cultural variation that is contingent on local environmental variation. Cross-cultural tests of the hypothesis that men have adaptations generating preference for low female waist-to-hip ratios (WHR) have used stimuli that were not scaled to local conditions, a...