Meta-analysis/Review paper. Top tier.
Click to access rhodes.meta.analysis.pdf
What makes a face attractive and why do we have the preferences we do? Emergence of preferences early in development and cross-cultural agreement on attractiveness challenge a long-held view that our preferences reflect arbitrary standards of beauty set by cultures. Averageness, symmetry, and sexual dimorphism are good candidates for biologically based standards of beauty. A critical review and meta-analyses indicate that all three are attractive in both male and female faces and across cultures. Theorists have proposed that face preferences may be adaptations for mate choice because attractive traits signal important aspects of mate quality, such as health. Others have argued that they may simply be by-products of the way brains process information. Although often presented as alternatives, I argue that both kinds of selection pressures may have shaped our perceptions of facial beauty.
…..Femininity is the strongest component of female attractiveness, but it showed no association with health (although only one study has looked for this). Femininity may signal fertility rather than health per se (Johnston 2000, Johnston & Franklin 1993, Symons 1979). The reasoning is that high estrogen/androgen ratio are associated with both feminine characteristics (e.g., small jaw, full lips) and fertility. A preference for feminine faces, therefore, would target sexually mature females. Facial femininity could also signal individual differences in fertility in adult females, to the extent that femininity declines with age.
What do you expect, it’s mostly men conducting the studies in this field.
Recently, male facial attractiveness has been linked to genetic heterozygosity at sites involved in immune function. Future studies should determine which components of male attractiveness (masculinity, averageness, symmetry) mediate this link, and whether female attractiveness is also linked to heterozygosity at these sites. A more direct test of a link between attractiveness and immunocompetence could also be done by challenging the immune system.