Not the most romantic of notions, especially from a man whose career has been devoted to researching, in essence, what makes a person beautiful. Johnston’s quest to understand attractiveness has led him not to the glitz and glamour of Vogue photo shoots or Nicole Kidman’s Oscar party, but to the lab. In the past 10 years, he and other beauty researchers have managed to explain in some detail how beauty is a product of evolution, a Darwinian mechanism for the survival of the species, that is both hard-wired into our brains and a product of culture.
On his Las Cruces, New Mexico, campus, Johnston designed a computer-graphics video that illustrates the spectrum of human beauty, starting with the “hypermasculinized” face (think Schwarzenegger) and morphing gradually to the other extreme, the “hyperfeminized” face (think Kidman). Johnston has shown the video to thousands of test subjects, both men and women, and asked them to choose at which point along the spectrum they find their ideal face. Men, it turns out, unanimously pick as most attractive the face with the most feminine features, which corresponds to a woman with the most accentuated “hormonal markers.” These are facial characteristics developed during puberty from the release of estrogen, which causes the lips to swell, the jaw to narrow and the eyes to widen. These features indicate fertility, and because they’re biologically programmed, they’re common to all cultures.
Women perceive beauty in a more nuanced way. They aren’t always attracted to the hypermasculinized, bushy-eyebrowed, wide-jawed caveman type, flush with testosterone. Their choice of a mate is informed by evolutionary complexities involving not only potential fertility and health but perceived ability to protect the female’s offspring through wealth and power.
More evidence that men are hamstrung by their biology comes from psychologist Devendra Singh of the University of Texas at Austin. In a study of the female form throughout history, Singh confirmed last year that the most important feature of the female body, from the ancient Egyptians to the streetwalkers on Sunset Boulevard, has been the hip-to-waist ratio. “What is the fascination with Jennifer Lopez’s bellybutton?” he asks. Because it draws attention to her hourglass form, a sign of fertility. Fortunately, evolution has left some wiggle room for culture. Ian Penton-Voak of Britain’s Sterling University demonstrated that faces you see as a child contribute to your vision of an ideal mate. It’s called “imprinting,” a process by which your brain makes a template of an ideal face that’s an average of all the faces you’ve seen, and it works for men and women. Not very romantic, but it’s better than dung.
