Abstract:
For a set of color video clips that depict a 360° view of the bodies of 43 young Caucasian women who are within the normal range of percentage of body fat, we show that their attractiveness to both male and female observers depends strongly on their percentage of body fat and their level of skin tanning, but is not significantly related to their cardiovascular fitness (a key health measure). Although evolutionary psychology suggests that physical health should play a role in determining attractiveness judgements, it appears that cardiovascular fitness may be a weak cue, at least in bodies not undergoing cardiovascular exercise. Instead, it seems that more salient cues, such as body mass and skin tanning, are the primary determinants of attractiveness judgements.

Excepts

Introduction: What drives attractiveness judgements? Some evolutionary psychologists have postulated that humans selected mates based on the display of certain physical cues that honestly signalled one mate to be more desirable (i.e., healthier and with a better reproductive potential) than another. Mate selection, in this way, would have enhanced their chances of successful reproduction, as mates with desirable cues are suggested to have been healthier and to have possessed greater reproductive potential. If attractiveness is an honest signal of a better quality mate, it is, therefore, possible to suggest that an attractive body should also be a healthy body.
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Discussion: The present results also show a positive link between attractiveness and skin tone, with those possessing darkertoned skin receiving higher ratings of attractiveness. Although many cross-cultural studies have suggested that paler skin is generally regarded as more attractive by human populations, several studies have suggested that, for Caucasian faces in the Europe and America, moderate levels of tanning are regarded as more attractive than no tanning. A paler coloring has been linked to both youth and fertility levels during the menstrual cycle; therefore, one might have argued that paler skin on the female body should be regarded as more attractive and healthy. However, skin color may be a culturally based status symbol indicating that someone with a tan can afford the free time necessary to acquire one, just as, in the 18th century, a paler complexion indicated higher status as it showed that an individual did not have to undertake manual outdoor labor. If this were the case, then one might expect preference for a darker skin tone to extend to all ethnic groups within a society. However, the preference for a more tanned appearance seems to be largely specific to Caucasians in Western cultures.
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In the current study, the correlation matrix showed that WCR was linked to attractiveness, although WHR was not. It has been suggested that women with a large bust relative to waist width (i.e., a low WCR) have higher levels of estrogen, which may in turn be positively associated with a higher probability of conception. Thus, WCR might be used as a proxy for estrogen levels, and the prominent positioning of the breasts on the front of the body makes WCR a comparatively easy judgement to make and thus allows it to influence attractiveness ratings. A similar role has also been suggested for WHR. However, neither torso ratio survived the multiple regression analysis in this study, most likely because both WCR and WHR were correlated with the percentage of body fat in this sample.
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A similar role has also been suggested for WHR. However, neither torso ratio survived the multiple regression analysis in this study, most likely because both WCR and WHR were correlated with the percentage of body fat in this sample. [Note: A correlation between the percentage of body fat and WHR is to be expected since large-scale epidemiological samples repeatedly demonstrate correlations between WHR and BMI (e.g., UK Department of Health, 2003).] This suggests that the major effects of the percentage of body fat on this sample of images may have been related more to dietary habits, and any additional influence of estrogen levels on body shape was either missed through sampling effects or simply outweighed by other factors.
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Some previous studies using line-drawn figures have reported a strong relationship between WHR and attractiveness judgements. However, these line-drawn stimuli covaried BMI and WHR (i.e., as the WHR increases, so does the apparent BMI of the figures); thus, the change in attractiveness rating could be due to changing WHR, BMI, or both . Studies that have used digital photographs of real women have found a strong effect of changing BMI and a much weaker effect of WHR . Consistent with this result, other studies that have attempted to independently manipulate shape changes found that, although WHR can be significantly correlated with attractiveness judgements, it is a much weaker cue than BMI . These findings are consistent with our own results. However, Smith et al. have also shown that there is considerable variability in the shape of torsos (synthesized from four independent features defined by principal components analysis) that are treated as equally attractive, suggesting that observers may make tradeoffs among different biometric attributes when judging attractiveness . Ultimately, to elucidate this complex problem, further research is required to identify exactly what image features drive perceptual judgements of attractiveness. But we also need to understand how genetic, environmental, and physiological factors interact to modify phenotypic appearance in the first place. Only then will it be possible to map the relationships between desired quality and biometric proxies such as the percentage of body fat, BMI, and WHR.   • • •