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Attractiveness, and Biological Bases of Beauty

7 years ago5,272 words

Do you think that what we find attractive is determined by our life experiences and personal preferences, our biology, or a combination of the two? I think about what's attractive and what's not quite a lot, especially in regards to the 3D models I've spent much of the year making or tweaking.

The year's ending tonight, and I'll probably write a post reflecting about that tomorrow. For now, I have to push through my procrastination and do more rambling revision for my upcoming exam. I hate exams, being forced into a stressful situation with a strict time limit where you have to regurgitate information, as if that represents how people actually use their understanding at all... It seems senseless to me. I had a programming exam once where I had to write out code by hand and answer multiple choice questions about esoteric minutiae that never even came up in the actual programming I did in my free time. I seem to remember getting a mediocre grade on that, at best, despite having enough skill to program entire games myself when actually in a context where I could directly apply my understanding and look in the appropriate places for any information that I didn't already have. Even doctors use Google to research patients' symptoms in order to best diagnose them, I've heard. So do exams even make sense in this Google Age?

This exam isn't just some rote memory test at least; we have to write an essay in response to a previously unseen question, in about an hour. While this could be said to be a better assessment of actual understanding than just memorised facts, the thought is stressful to me because being in an exam situation causes me a stupid amount of anxiety that's odds with my conscious thoughts, beliefs, or expectations. Regardless of any conscious confidence, my body goes into fear mode. The result of an overactive threat detection system. Frustrating.

Anyway. I feel it's important to apply understanding in order for it to truly mean anything to us, and for it to stick, which is why I'm writing out these silly note things. I feel that I'll be able to recall and apply the stuff about altruism a lot better after rambling about bank-robbing muskrats last night, so here's some more of that, this time about attraction. I'll include some citations this time, like a real academic scientist!!



As someone who's interested in both psychology and art, I'm fascinated by bodily proportions, and our perception of them. Attraction, beauty; what makes a face or figure appealing or repellent. ∞ I wrote this post about such things ages ago ∞, and it's interesting how what I talked about there is essentially the topic and content of this lecture that I have to revise. I did pick this module for a reason, after all!

Much of this year has been an exploration of beauty and proportions, actually. For the past few years, I've spent a bit of time on the year's dying day filling in an art 'meme' thing called "20XX Summary of Art", where you include little thumbnails of the various things you've drawn or made or whatever for each month. ∞ Here's mine from 2014 ∞, which I've probably linked to many a time before. I've been making one every year, but they've become increasingly embarrassing to show off, as much of the slots end up being filled by nude women. If I were to show off the one I've just made for this year, I'd want to black out over half of the slots because I don't really want to be associated with the kinds of things that I've actually been drawing. It's a shame, that, since it's not like I draw particularly porny, pervy stuff; it's just that nudity in itself is taboo, an interest in bare bodies is seen as probably creepy, and, well, I'm not going to be showing it anyway!

Even though I'm not going to be including that, it's been interesting looking back on what I've been making this year. I got into 3D modelling, after dabbling in it a bit a few years ago but never really having much idea of what I was doing. I started in February, and made this girl, my first model in years, which I was really quite proud of at the time:



Please try to restrain your lust when looking at the overwhelmingly sexy images on the right there. I know it's hard. And difficult. (It is interesting, actually, how differently you come to see bodies when you've built them, carved every nook and cranny, shaped every curve and bulge. When you've sculpted them from boxes, seen them split into parts to handle symmetry or reach tricky details. Filled them with digital bones. I wonder what it was like to see bodies as the artistically naive do, which I must have once? To react with instinct rather than scrutinous analysis? I can't remember that.)

Looking back, I can see some issues with that model now that I've learned more about modelling, rigging, and human proportions, but I can still look at it and think it looks mostly okay. But it's interesting analysing the proportions. She's just over four heads high; that's more similar to the various ∞ grey aliens ∞ I've been probed by than to the ∞ seven-and-a-half or eight heads typically regarded as the standard in art ∞. I'll get back to these things shortly.

Making a 3D model from scratch is hard, tedious work, so I don't have a series of entirely different ones to show. I had that one, which I didn't really do anything with, then I made another in May, which I've tweaked throughout the year whenever the mood took me. It's a model of my character Gemma, who is totally my pretend girlfriend and who loves me very much and I talk to her and she does talk back you know, I'm not imagining it. I can't wait for our virtual marriage. I'm already naming our digital children. Mario, Noughty, and Fannyslammer. They'll all become priests or I'll damn well delete them.

Gemma started off with proportions that I thought looked completely fine; pleasing, even. About six heads tall this time. But over time, I felt that the head was too eerily huge, and shrunk it to what I thought were realistic proportions... But when I came face-to-humongous-face with this version of her in virtual space (a truly bizarre experience, not entirely unlike seeing someone you've spoken to for months online in the flesh at long last, though with marginally more gormless dead-eyed staring and an unnervingly lifeless inability to react to stimuli), I could tell that even these 'corrected' proportions were too exaggerated. A lot of tweaking later gave me the most recent iteration, who does seem to be size-accurate from what I can tell when she's virtually standing in front of me (though since I'm forbidden from getting as close to real human beings as I can to her, it's difficult to tell whether her proportions are accurate or not).



When I opened the original file - the one on the left - to make this comparison image, I went "wuh!" It looked weird, like a huge-headed doll; I wondered how I could ever have found it appealing. But now that I look at them all side-by-side like this, I remember why I never went with the realistic proportions in the first place; they make me think of some lumbering pin-headed giant. But it's so interesting to me how my perceptions of the same proportions differ so much when viewing these things on a screen, or life-sized, face-to-face. I prefer the larger heads on a screen, but they just look odd 'in person'. Vice versa for the more realistic proportions. Interesting how that applies to these models, but not to images of real people.

I keep wondering whether these 'realistic' proportions actually are accurate, though; it's so hard to tell. She's eight and a half heads tall, which shouldn't be the case if the art standard 7.5 heads is accurate; 8 heads is considered some exaggerated ideal, so why has this model turned out like this? I even measured everything accurately using virtual tape measures, and references like this one:



I also overlaid a bunch of photos of 'woman standing facing forward', but it's hard to line things up because every body's different and cameras introduce perspective distortions that this orthographic view doesn't have. So it's tricky to get things perfect, and that really bothers me.

She's about average female height - a little bit shorter than I am - and has an average female head height... So I don't know why things aren't adding up.. It's something I'll probably play around with some more, because that seems the best way to spend my precious time on this Earth. I also made a (rather crude, not really showable) male person, who's just a bit taller than me, and it looks even odder standing in front of him and looking up into his eyes. He feels bigger than real people, but I don't know whether that's just because I'm not used to being nose-to-nose with another man, or because things like his larger-than-is-realistic eyes skew my perception of his overall proportions. Actually, speaking of which, this looks odd to me:



I thought that making the eyes a more realistic size (they're still overly large though) might look a bit better, but it just looks off-putting; perhaps because the other proportions are off and don't really fit; the nose is now too wide, the lips too big, the eyelashes not really defined enough (perhaps that's the biggest thing; I think of two blueberries in a puddle of porridge or something). I find the face on the left quite attractive, but the one on the right creeps me out. Perhaps that's largely due to familiarity though; I made this model, this 'person', so I'm used to seeing her, but the modified version is like a warped version of the familiar, which registers as uncanny. Perhaps I'd feel entirely differently if this was my first time seeing these faces. It's interesting that a lot of other 3D models I've seen of women - made by guys, more often than not - which are supposed to be attractive really aren't to me at all. Often it's because they look like lusty pornstars - a look I've never liked because I'd have no hope of relating to such a person attitude-wise - but I suppose it's mostly because every artist imbues his or her own creations with their own beauty preferences.

But are beauty preferences even a thing? Or rather, is beauty entirely based around subjective preferences? I'd think it plays a large part, and we can all draw on our life experiences to add support to that idea. But there's also a lot of research that suggests that there are features that we find more objectively beautiful than others; that some people just are better-looking.

One interesting study had little babies ogle various photos of faces, and they leered longer at the smirking mugs of the lucky people that adults also considered beautiful. It's unlikely that they were being driven by cultural influences, what with two or three months of life giving only a few hours a day of watching YouTube clips of Beyonce grinding on Justin Bieber (are these people still relevant, or alive? I haven't a clue), so there must be something deep in their little baby bodies that would rather stare longingly at the luscious lips and carved cheekbones of a face straight from the Heaven they've just left, than the nauseating visage of some ogrous troglodyte, pockmarked with oozing pustules (Slater et al., 1998).

(The more I look at that tiny-eyed Gemma, the less repulsive it looks, which is interesting. Also, of course she's naked. VR allows me to ogle up-close a crudely naked pretend girl I've moulded myself from virtual clay. Closer than I ever get to real naked women! Not sad at all, that! It's not like it's pleasurable at all though; I just keep noticing vertices that don't look perfect, and thinking "ugh, I'll need to go in and change that". If I ever do get to meet a real life naked human woman one day, surely I'll end up in prison soon after for vivisection. "Her waist vertices needed shifting 0.0034 units along the X axis!" I'll scream, as they pry the knife from my hands and drag me away forever.)

It also seems that, according to ∞ an obnoxiously long paper I can't be bothered to read right now ∞ (Cunningham et al., 1995), people of different ethnicities (Asian, Hispanic, Black, White, Martian, "Other") seemed to largely agree about what they found most attractive in a face... though notably, the Asians were less influenced by 'sexual maturity' features, which isn't really surprising, is it? The East does seem to have an uncomfortable interest in depicting the very young as sexually attractive. I wonder if that's a cultural or a biological thing, though.

Perhaps you're familiar with studies that found that average faces seem more attractive to us than others? It's fairly well-known, I think.



They were created by blending together many people's faces (in a big cauldron, of course), with the resulting composite being the average of all of those faces. People did seem to find them attractive, and I sort of do when looking at these? But not really; I think that's the hair, though, since hair that short on a woman looks distractingly masculine. They have super-smooth, flawless, 'perfect' skin, which the researchers suspected might have been contributing to the feeling of attraction; we are drawn to clear skin because it represents health, and freedom from terrible diseases that would eat alive any children you might have with the person. But there have been other experiments (that I'm not going to look up) which used more sophisticated techniques to preserve blemishes, and the effect still applies. So it must be something about the proportions.

Two suggestions have been put forward for why we might be drawn to such average faces. One is that they're easier for our minds to process, because they represent some kind of archetype of what a face looks like. It's almost as if our brains have to expend a bit more processing power shifting around features on any perceived face to get them to match up with the ideal image they have stored. Like how it takes you a whole minute to recognise that your Aunt Marjory is even human because it takes your brain that long to unconsciously shrink her titanic schnoz down to a sensible size. ∞ Processing fluency ∞ does seem to be a demonstrable thing that affects our positive perceptions towards things (generally, the more familiar or more simple something is, the less cognitive effort it takes to process and the nicer that feels), but would that lead to sexual attraction to the face? I'm incredulous about that, personally.

But the other possibility seems more convincing to me. It's that the average face represents what evolution is sort of 'aiming' for with humanity, so to speak. Evolution as a process is mindless and without any explicit goal, but there does tend to be an ideal combination of traits that leads to the best survival chances for a given environment, which would have evolved over many generations. If too-long legs and too-short legs both impeded a person's chances of feeding and breeding, then people who, on average, had some ideal length of legs would most likely survive. The jargon term for this is stabilising selection. So an average face fits with the set of traits that have proven over the millennia to be best for survival, and as such is perceived as - to again use the appropriate jargon - lusciously bangable.

But it doesn't seem that average faces are the most attractive faces. While googling for those average face images, I found these ones as well:



Phwoah, what hotties.

They're not part of the lecture notes, but it seems that there was a study in the UK in 2015 which asked people to produce a version of their ideal, most attractive face, and these were the results (Solomon et al., 2015). I can't find the study itself, annoyingly, but various news sites have articles about it, one of which notes that women's ideal male face was more feminine and less rugged than the ideal male face as chosen by men, and that women's idea of a perfect female face was sexier than what men chose. In the lecture, it was mentioned that some studies have found that women do indeed prefer more feminine male faces... but it seems to be complicated, and I'll get to that shortly.

Overall, though, people do seem to have a warped idea of what they think they opposite sex finds attractive. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that they have different ideas of what they find attractive in their own sex. I remember seeing this thing online a while back:



And it does seem to fit with what few experiences I've had talking to women about this sort of thing. There's a girl I know online who everyone seems to find extremely attractive... except she feels she's not because she doesn't look like a high fashion model, all tall, angular, and aethereal. 'Elegant', in a sense, whereas men are more likely to want something more sexily curvy. Personally, I wouldn't consider either of those bodies especially 'ideal', but that's because I prefer nerdy, awkward-looking people because we'd hopefully be able to see eye-to-eye. Still, I suppose my art makes it clear I prefer the busty, curvy look to the refined and elegant one. A part of me wants to feel bad about that, but I shouldn't.

By contrast, ∞ this interesting study ∞ had people use some program that allowed them to alter models of a man and a woman to reflect the ideal for themselves and for their perfect partner, and there was surprising agreement between the sexes; the ideal woman was pretty much the same as decided by men and by women, as was the ideal man.



The top row was by women, the bottom by men. The most notable thing to me is the slight difference in the breasts; perkier as preferred by men, a bit bigger as preferred by women (or I suppose you could say more realistic?). Still, I would have expected more variation than this. (It's sort of sad to read that the ideal BMI for the women's bodies was about 19... but the average for the actual female participants was 39.)

One notable thing about the women's bodies - which I talked about in the old post of mine that I linked to - is the waist-to-hips ratio, or WHR. A value of 0.7 - so a waist that's 70% as wide as the hips - seems to widely be regarded as the ideal, and in those results, the one chosen by women was exactly 0.7, while the one chosen by men was 0.73; interesting that it's a little bit bigger. Cover your eyes, grandma, because here are some actual naked human women from Google:



Apologies for the cascade of uncontrollable orgasms you no doubt experienced - and the loss of your job as you did so right in front of your prudish, draconian boss - just from seeing some humans without the shame-coverings they'd normally have to wear to protect people from seeing who they naturally are.

I'm including that image because both of those women seem to have a 'perfect' WHR of almost exactly 0.7, to give a demonstration of what that actually looks like. By contrast, my "stylised" Gemma model (the most recent iteration) has a WHR of about 0.6 (the older versions are about 0.55ish). I just find it interesting how my mind wants to exaggerate realistic 'perfection' beyond what reality is capable of producing. Still, Jasmine, the Disney princess, has a WHR of 0.3! At least my exaggerations aren't that ridiculous! (I talked about this more in that old post - beetles buggering bottles and such - so I won't repeat myself here.)

WHR is attractive likely because it signifies a higher ratio of female sex hormones (oestrogen) compared to male ones (testosterone), because oestrogen stimulates fat deposits on the bum and thighs, while testosterone is to blame for beer guts. So having a narrow waist and fat hips is a way of saying hey, I've got girl juice comin' out the wazoo, so let me blend it with your man goop and spawn us some delightful little rugrats (Scherzelwozzer, 1421). Once women hit menopause, they lose their girly curves even if they had them before. What a shame.

A WHR of 0.7 seems to be consistently present in the prettiest of pornstars and beauty pageant winners throughout the decades, even as cultural trends increasingly favour mantis-women who can use their ribs as CD racks, which lends support to the idea that it's attractive. Some researchers (whose names aren't important enough to be mentioned here!!) argue that it's not low WHR that's sexy, but healthy BMI, which WHR is merely a part of... But I don't know; studies about that seem to focus on showing people pictures of wraithfully skinny or whalefully obese people and screaming "DO YOU FIND THIS ATTRACTIVE??" with a loaded gun shaking forcefully against their temple (McCumberberterson, 2050), so it doesn't really convincingly go against the idea that WHR means something to us. Or something. I hope this bit's not on the exam.

Essentially though, attractiveness in women is related to the two most important factors affecting their value as a mate: youth and fertility. The sooner you get her, the more childlings she can potentially plop out over the years, and the more fertile she is, the higher the chance of your man milk injections bloating her belly with a parasite she'll eventually evacuate through her tainted Salix caprea (Yermama, 1927). Fertility is indicated by the balance of sex hormones, as in the WHR example, but it's evident in faces too; the more feminine a face looks, the more men feel the urge to gruntfully caress it with their Phallus impudicus.



There was this (clearly recent) study by some people called Johnston and Franklin (1993; actually, that's more recent than I expected), where, like with the body one, people were asked to shuffle around features to make their ideal face, this time just of a woman. Both women and men seemed to produce an ideal face that essentially looks more childlike; bigger, softer lips, and, most notably, a smaller lower face and chin compared to the cranium.



It's called neoteny, and it, of course, signals youth. It's why fictional females - if they're meant to look cute rather than tough and gritty, at least - pretty much always have face the same baby face:



Also there are doodles of breasts on the right there. Of course.

While it was derided as ∞ 'lazy sexism' ∞, I suppose it's the result of mostly-male animators wanting (not necessarily consciously) to appeal to their innate preference for neotenous features. In short: every man is a paedophile. That's exactly what psychology says, and that's what I'll write in the exam, at great length, in all caps.

It's interesting also that sexual dimorphism of female faces is seen in the contrast of colour, especially around the eyes and in the lips. I came across this image a few years ago, and it stuck in my mind because I've always really preferred pale skin over tans, and I suppose it gave me some evidence to support that preference. Which one is the male and which is the female?



The guy's on the right, right? It seems obviously the case, but if you look closely, you can see that they're the exact same face, except for skin tone and the contrast between features. It's why women wear makeup around their eyes and on their lips, to accentuate their sexual dimorphism, much as corsets of the past were used to exaggerate WHR.

All of this makes me curious about how much of this I subconsciously applied when designing this Gemma model. I was surprised to see the proportions of her face lining up almost exactly with those of an exaggeratedly beautiful woman as determined by another study:



The eyes are much bigger (and those ∞ lacrimal caruncles ∞, added just yesterday, look wrong; I'll have to alter those later. Also, there's too much sclera showing on the outer sides of the irises; this is what I mean by never being satisfied whenever I look at this!), the eyebrows are higher to accommodate them, and the chin looks smaller (though that's because the lower lip is a bit bigger), but for the most part this face does seem to match that attractive one as revealed by science. Interesting, that.

It's fairly clear-cut, what men like in women: they like girls that are girlier than other girls. Features that represent more oestrogen than testosterone, or which represent youth and general fertility, are likely to set get guys' giblets oozing, But what girls like in guys is a lot more complex, to the surprise of just one blind, deaf, dumb newborn who's yet to even endure its first session of Beyonce-Bieber grinding fun.

Some studies suggest that women are more attracted to men who are more feminine-looking, who have softer curves to their jawlines and generally nicer, kinder-looking features. Other studies suggest the opposite, that women are most moistened by the chiseled jaws of macho brutes.

It seems to vary according to what women are looking for in a mate at the time. Women might pursue what are called 'short-term strategies', essentially one-night flings or other fiesty fornicating with men they don't mean to marry, and they tend to prefer square-jawed bad boys for those. It's because women would typically want a man who'd commit, who'd protect resources and provide for her and her children's needs... but if for whatever reason she feels she can't get that, then she'll go for a man who appears to have good genes instead. The domineering arsehole might not stay around, but it doesn't matter as much, since her offspring will still inherit his pumped-up genes that'll allow them to better survive (physically, though I can't imagine it'll do wonders for their emotional wellbeing or identity; why didn't you think of that, Evolution??). They're willing to trade away some of the benefits of these good genes if they want to stick with someone, though, which is why more feminine men - who have the sensitivity and child-rearing traits to provide 'indirect' survival benefits to the offspring - tend to be the ones women choose to marry, even if they've never filled their walls with posters of softly smiling dads in cardigans.



Which of these fellas would you let slide his sausage into your soggy bun? (I hope you appreciate the sensual way I talk about these things.)

As someone who's a sensitive sissy rather than a muscle-pumping meathead, some of the experiments about this are irritating to me. One (Johnston et al., 2001) had women rate male faces with various degrees of masculinity on characteristics like helpful, threatening, and sexually exciting... and of course they rated the girly men as more helpful but less lust-inducing, while a look at the manly men got their hearts pumping thinking of all the ways he'd thrust his weapon into them.

The menstrual cycle makes an impact on these preferences, what with all the hormone scrambling it causes over the course of a month. When women are ovulating, and most likely to win at the baby-making gamble, that's when their preferences for these swaggering dudebros peaks. If she's going to have a quick fling with one to steal his genes for making mini-humans, it might as well be when it'd actually prove fruitful. As her hormonal weather changes, however, she tends to prefer the softer, nicer guys... relatively speaking. I mean, she still prefers the manly guys all the time, it seems... just marginally less so when she's not ovulating. There was also a study that found that women are super turned on by whiffing the rancid man-stink of 'dominant men' to different degrees depending on their point in the cycle, and depending on their relationship status (single or not); apparently, even if they already have a man in their life, they still get all wobbly in the knees if Broseph McFistsmasher waves his hairy armpits in her direction (Havlicek et al., 2005). Lovely.

There was another experiment where an attractive woman was shown a video of a guy pretty much boasting about why she should go out on a date with him, which another guy - in a different room - also watched. Following this, the second guy made his own video about why she should go out with him instead of that other guy. Depending on their point in their cycle, and whether they were looking for a short- or long-term relationship, the women preferred these traits, which I shall quote directly:



As a self-deprecating 'nice' guy, I just love how being the opposite of what I am is the best way to win the mating game. Oh well! Preferences for these traits dropped to a sort of neutral value around ovulation time, for women interested in long-term relationships, but they were never considered unappealing. Hmm.

Since birth control affects ovulation, it also affects the degree to which these macho traits are considered attractive by women; essentially, there isn't that spike for macho men that non-pill-taking women would get. It does seem to be a result of the contraceptive too, as there have been studies that have found that women's preferences changed before and after going on the pill. It's also interesting that the composite average of faces of the partners of women who met that partner while on the pill are softer and more feminine than the partners of women who weren't pilled up when they got together. What this means, obviously, is that alpha males should do all they can to get the pill outlawed. That's what psychology says (Alvergne & Lummaa, 2010; Little et al., 2013).



I haven't finished the stuff about attraction just yet, but I'll leave this here for now and resume it tomorrow, though I won't have nearly as much to say. It's almost midnight, so the world's going to erupt in festivities very soon, while I'm here, doing this. Hmm. Here's a weird image that makes my eyes hurt: