Darwinian aesthetics of female face

The widespread view in the social sciences that physical beauty is arbitrary has been seriously questioned recently by evolutionary psychology (Gangestad and Simpson 2000). Human beings have been selected to be able to evaluate cues associated with the reproductive value of a potential mate (Buss and Schmitt 1993; Langlois et al. 2000; Symons 1979). For females, age has a relatively invariant association with fertility and thus with their mate value. Since their fecundity sharply declines with age, body traits indicating their youth are preferred by males (Bereczkei et al. 1997; Buunk et al. 2001; Kenrick and Keefe 1992). A youthful or neotenous face is characterized by certain facial proportions, especially a thinner jaw, small nose, large eyes, and large, full lips. Raters found feminized female faces the most attractive, whereas masculinization - enlarged jaw, lateral growth of cheekbones, and lengthening of lower facial bones - decreased attractiveness (Johnston et al. 2001; Perrett et al. 1994,1998) .Several studies of various populations have revealed that male raters find faces that appear younger than their actual age to be more attractive (Cunningham et al. 1995; Jones 1995). According to the sensory bias theory of sexual selection, neoteny is a supernormal cue of youth. During evolution individual females whose faces exhibit exaggerated cues of youth have an advantage in female-female competition for desirable mates (Jones 1996). Men’s preference for facial markers of high, age-related fecundity was a sensory bias that selected for neoteny in female faces (Miller 1998). Other researchers suggest that attractive facial traits are not so much exaggerated cues of age as indicators of actual phenotypic and genetic quality (Fink and Penton-Voak 2002; Thornhill and Gangestad 1993,1999) . These features - high cheekbones, full lips, small chin - are onsidered to be hormone markers that show a relatively high ratio of estrogen to testosterone. Although a high level of estrogen is associated with fertility, it could also imply harmful effects given that estrogen can draw resources away from other bodily functions (e.g., immune system, repair mechanisms), and its byproducts are toxic. Therefore, estrogen markers on the face may reliably signal that a female’s immune system is so highquality that it can deal with the detrimental effects of high estrogen levels (Gangestad 2000; Grammer and Thornhill 1994; Thornhill and Grammer 1999). According to the Zahavi principle, only people with good genes are able to pay the costs of displaying such traits. Female facial attractiveness thus advertises the high immunocompetence of the bearer, and it evolved because of male preference for healthy and fertile mates. Indeed, several recent studies have revealed that the most attractive female faces have extreme secondary sex traits, and their bearers’ health condition is above average (Hume and Montgomerie 2001; Kalick et al. 1998; Shackelford and Larsen 1999).Although facial traits that are judged beautiful across cultures have been investigated using a framework of sexual selection theory, the effects of head hair on our esthetic evaluations have rarely been examined from an evolutionary perspective. Yet, hair plays a significant role in our mate choice (Kingsley 1995). One of the first characteristics we notice upon meeting another person is their hair. In an experiment in which the same women were portrayed either as blondes or as brunettes, blondes were rated as more attractive, feminine, emotional, and pleasure seeking, whereas brunettes were seen as more intelligent (Cunningham et al. 1997). The authors suggest that blondness serves as a cue to neoteny. Another study has revealed that younger women tend to wear their hair longer than older women, and that hair quality was correlated with women’s health (Hinsz et al. 2001). Grammer and colleagues (2001) found that males prefer long hair in women and speculated that longer hair may provide a larger surface for the distribution of sexual pheromones produced in the apocrine glands. Several studies found that males with scalp hair were rated as more handsome, strong, active, and sharp than those who were balding. Baldness among males led to decreased perceptions of socially desirable traits, including attractiveness and assertiveness (Muscarella and Cunningham 1996). At the same time, a receding hairline may convey a message of maturity and social dominance, and baldness is consistently associated with an increased perception of age and intelligence.10