Female facial beauty

The fertility hypothesis

Victor S. Johnston | New Mexico State University, Las Cruces

Prior research on facial beauty has suggested that the average female face in a population is perceived to be the most attractive face. This finding, however, is based on an image processing methodology that appears to be flawed. An alternative method for generating attractive faces is described and the findings using this procedure are compared with the reports of other experimenters. The results suggest that (1) beautiful female faces are not average, but vary from the average in a systematic manner, and (2) female beauty can best be explained by a sexual selection viewpoint, whereby selection favors cues that are reliable indicators of fertility.

Published online: 17 May 2000
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.8.1.06joh

Cited by

Cited by 18 other publications

Becker, D. Vaughn, Douglas T. Kenrick, Stephen Guerin & Jon K. Maner

2005. Concentrating on Beauty: Sexual Selection and Sociospatial Memory. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 31:12 ► pp. 1643 ff.

Belletti, Nicole E. & T. Joel Wade

2008. In Racism in the 21st Century, ► pp. 93 ff.

Ekrami, Omid, Peter Claes, Ellen Van Assche, Mark D. Shriver, Seth M. Weinberg, Mary L. Marazita, Susan Walsh & Stefan Van Dongen

2021. Fluctuating Asymmetry and Sexual Dimorphism in Human Facial Morphology: A Multi-Variate Study. Symmetry 13:2 ► pp. 304 ff.

Johnston, Victor S.

2006. Mate choice decisions: the role of facial beauty. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10:1 ► pp. 9 ff.

Johnston, Victor S., Rebecca Hagel, Melissa Franklin, Bernhard Fink & Karl Grammer

2001. Male facial attractiveness: evidence for hormone-mediated adaptive design. Evolution and Human Behavior 22:4 ► pp. 251 ff.

Konečni

2013. Empirical Psycho-Aesthetics and Her Sisters: Substantive and Methodological Issues—Part II. The Journal of Aesthetic Education 47:1 ► pp. 1 ff.

Kočnar, Tomáš, S. Adil Saribay, Karel Kleisner & Piotr Sorokowski

2019. Perceived attractiveness of Czech faces across 10 cultures: Associations with sexual shape dimorphism, averageness, fluctuating asymmetry, and eye color. PLOS ONE 14:11 ► pp. e0225549 ff.

Muñoz-Reyes, Jose A., Miguel Pita, Maria Arjona, Santiago Sanchez-Pages & Enrique Turiegano

2014. Who is the fairest of them all? The independent effect of attractive features and self-perceived attractiveness on cooperation among women. Evolution and Human Behavior 35:2 ► pp. 118 ff.

Olson, Ingrid R. & Christy Marshuetz

2005. Facial Attractiveness Is Appraised in a Glance.. Emotion 5:4 ► pp. 498 ff.

Reeve, Simon D., Kristine M. Kelly & Lisa L. M. Welling

2016. Transitory Environmental Threat Alters Sexually Dimorphic Mate Preferences and Sexual Strategy. Evolutionary Psychological Science 2:2 ► pp. 101 ff.

Reeve, Simon D., Justin K. Mogilski & Lisa L. M. Welling

2019. Environmental Safety Threat Alters Mate Choice Processes in Humans: Further Evidence for the Environmental Security Hypothesis. Evolutionary Psychological Science 5:2 ► pp. 186 ff.

Rhodes, Gillian

2006. The Evolutionary Psychology of Facial Beauty. Annual Review of Psychology 57:1 ► pp. 199 ff.

Russell, Deborah C.

2006. Raise your hand if you think I am attractive: Second and fourth digit ratio as a predictor of self- and other-ratings of attractiveness. Personality and Individual Differences 40:5 ► pp. 997 ff.

Scarbrough, Pamela S. & Victor S. Johnston

2005. Individual differences in women's facial preferences as a function of digit ratio and mental rotation ability. Evolution and Human Behavior 26:6 ► pp. 509 ff.

Scott, Isabel M., Andrew P. Clark, Steven C. Josephson, Adam H. Boyette, Innes C. Cuthill, Ruby L. Fried, Mhairi A. Gibson, Barry S. Hewlett, Mark Jamieson, William Jankowiak, P. Lynne Honey, Zejun Huang, Melissa A. Liebert, Benjamin G. Purzycki, John H. Shaver, J. Josh Snodgrass, Richard Sosis, Lawrence S. Sugiyama, Viren Swami, Douglas W. Yu, Yangke Zhao & Ian S. Penton-Voak

2014. Human preferences for sexually dimorphic faces may be evolutionarily novel. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111:40 ► pp. 14388 ff.

Thompson, L. A., V. Madrid, S. Westbrook & V. Johnston

2001. Infants attend to second-order relational properties of faces. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 8:4 ► pp. 769 ff.

Thompson, Laura A., Jeanne Malmberg, Neil K. Goodell & Ronald L. Boring

2004. The Distribution of Attention Across a Talker's Face. Discourse Processes 38:1 ► pp. 145 ff.

Żelaźniewicz, Agnieszka, Judyta Nowak & Bogusław Pawłowski

2020. Birth size and morphological femininity in adult women. BMC Evolutionary Biology 20:1

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