My theory is that beauty is not fickle or subjective at all. (For this post I refer to peoples ideas of what is beautiful) It is pragmatic and necessary.

Yes this is an evolutionary psychology post.

Beautiful traits are indicators of health and fertility. Being a good judge of beauty is necessary to ensure you end up with a healthy family. Someone with a good eye for beauty is someone perceptive, nothing more.

This can be shown just by listing beautiful traits.

Caveats:

  • Here I am mixing up cultural ideas, and universally held ideas. I’ll try not to bias it with my personal ideas. I won’t separate those things, and I won’t try to isolate the biological from the cultural, because it’s impossible.

  • I’m also conflating beauty and attractiveness, because in this context I think they are the same

  • Having very thin leg and armpit hair is a sign of good hormonal balance - crucial for a successful pregnancy. Having too much might indicate menopause or other problems.

  • The age 16-25 age bracket, obviously.

  • Big boobs are not actually corrolated with breastfeeding ability. It’s not size that’s important - the correlation is much more subtle and poorly understood. But men’s taste for boobs is equally subtle and unclassifiable. Men unconsciously know what is important to look for, but science does not.

  • Not being obese, obviously. Not looking blotchy or diseased or unhealthy, or weak in any way.

I’m putting dancing skills in this category, though most people put that down as “showing creativity”, which is normally part of a contradictory argument that beauty is subjective. More on that later.

  • And long hair maybe, but that’s a more subtle question. Short or thin hair can be a sign of bad health or hormones, and it can be a racial thing. But I think that the perception of beauty accounts for that and makes the correct judgement.

  • foreignness, obviously.

  • etc etc. I think I’ve covered all the main beauty stereotypes though.

You could make a similar analysis of women’s perceptions of men. And you should!

A quick internet browse shows that other people have had similar ideas.

This last article is very good. It discusses many traits in detail, starting with face symmetry and anding with learnt preferences.

I see these studies as complementary to my theory. I haven’t yet seen an explanation as convincing as mine, that joins together all the important factors. The things that tend to be missing are:

  • considering all the important factors in a multivariate analysis.

  • measurability - data which does not rely on questionaires. Correlating metrics which can be concretely linked to fertility, and can be measured quantitatively, and which do not vary with race or other extraneous factors. Then you can quantify the strength of each correlation. Only then is the result convincing. Talk of the importance of facial symmetry - it’s interesting but if you can’t measure it then you can’t correlate it with fertility, so you can’t use it in a robust theory.

  • To test my theory, you don’t have to do a single survey, so not subjectivity creeps into the results. You can measure the strength of the correlation between armpit hair and fertility. The result becomes meaningful when put beside the correlations for the other measurable factors. Only the interpretation of the results is subjective.

Done this way, you could even discover more subconcious factors. There could easily by crucial correlations which everybody lives by, but nobody knows about.

The “showing creativity” argument that professional anthropologists use is not junk. The importance of “dancing skills” is a good example of where biological measurable factors (health, fitness) interact with cultural unquantifiable factors. These factors are real, and they can make for enlightening discussions but they cannot be part of any serious theory if they cannot be measured.