Symmetry may be attractive from an evolutionary perspective, but does it really mean healthy? Look no further than Hollywood to see that the people we think of as the “most” attractive, while symmetrical, aren’t necessarily the ones you’d want bearing, raising, or touching your kids (Britney Spears, for example). Does our face give clues to overall health?
Research indicates that in animals and humans, symmetry can be a good indicator of health. Those with outward signs of symmetrical development do tend to be healthy. Only a few studies have looked at the corollary of this; that is, does asymmetry indicate bad health? A study done in 1997 found that people with facial asymmetry are more likely to have psychological, emotional, and physiological distress than those with symmetrical faces. However, it’s tough to parse out whether they have these problems because they’ve been perceived to be unattractive throughout their lives, or whether their psychological distresses are due to genetic causes (most likely a combination of both). Perhaps symmetry tells us something about physical fitness, but gives us fewer cues about a person’s psychological attributes.
Even if symmetry does equal attraction in our minds, it’s one of multiple facial cues we use to judge who’s hot and who’s not. One of things we find most attractive is when someone looks just like us; researchers believe this is because we’ve looked at our parents faces since we were young, and want someone who looks like them. Just as people often look like their dogs, couples also tend to look like each other. (A question I’d like to see answered: do adoptees or people not raised by their biological parents still prefer to date people that look like them?)
And then there are physiologic cues beyond symmetry. One of the best known is a woman’s waist to hip ratio. Numerous studies have found that women with a waist-to-hip ratio of around 0.7 are the most attractive to men. (This ratio means your waist is smaller than your hips.) This so-called “hour-glass figure” may indicate that a woman has deposited fat around her hips and is ready to bear children. Most encouragingly, this ratio holds true for a wide range of weights.
Whether we want their kids or merely want to make out, those people whose bodies look healthy, genetically fit, and able to reproduce are most attractive to us. This means symmetry, hips, and a familiar face can go a long way to landing a lover.
Photo Source: Erica Simone (cc). Updated November 23, 2008
