Human (Homo sapiens) facial attractiveness in relation to skin texture and color.

Fink, Bernhard; Grammer, Karl; Thornhill, Randy

doi:10.1037/0735-7036.115.1.92

Cited by 272 publications

(222 citation statements)

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“…Given these conditions, a maximum of 12 traits used in mate choice could possibly evolve, 9 of which would be non-costly and 3 would be costly. Such a small number of traits is inconsistent with the wide variety of mate choice traits actually employed by various animals species, including humans (BUSS 1995(BUSS , 1999CARTWRIGHT 2000;FINK et al 2001;FURN-HAM et al 2006;GANGESTAD and THORNHILL 2003;MAYNARD SMITH and HARPER 2003;MILLER 2000;RHODES et al 2003;SHACKELFORD et al 2005;SINGH and RANDALL 2007;THORNHILL and GANGESTAD 2006;ZAHAVI 1975ZAHAVI , 2003ZAHAVI and ZAHAVI 1997).…”

Section: The Limits On the Number Of Independent Traits Used In Mate mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The above conclusions are consistent with non-costly mate choice traits appearing to be much more common than costly traits in both human males and females. Some examples of non-costly traits are height and upper-body musculature in males, and hip-to-waist ratio and skin condition in females (BUSS 1995(BUSS , 1999CARTWRIGHT 2000;FINK et al 2001;FURNHAM et al 2006;MILLER 2000;SHACKELFORD et al 2005;SINGH and RANDALL 2007). The above conclusions are also consistent with creative intelligence being considered to be one of the most attractive mental traits in human males (HASELTON and MILLER 2006); creative intelligence seems to be strongly correlated with certain harmful mental disorders in humans, such as schizophrenia, which likely posed a significant survival handicap to our human ancestors (KELLER and MILLER 2006;NESSE and WILLIAMS 1994).…”

Section: Examples Of Exploratory Theorizing Based On the Mathematicalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A hypothesized costly mate choice trait displayed by males and used by females in mate choice is the presence of facial features indicating high levels of testosterone (e.g., angular facial features), apparently because testosterone suppresses the immune system and thus is an indicator that the males in question have had a particularly effective immune system up until the time they reached reproductive maturity (GANGESTAD and THORNHILL 2003;RHODES et al 2003;THORNHILL and GANG-ESTAD 2006). Non-costly mate choice traits also seem to be more common than costly traits in both human males and females; examples are height and upper-body musculature in males, and hip-to-waist ratio and skin condition in females (BUSS 1995(BUSS , 1999CARTWRIGHT 2000;FINK et al 2001;FURNHAM et al 2006;MILLER 2000;SHACKELFORD et al 2005;SINGH and RANDALL 2007).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A mathematical analysis of the evolution of human mate choice traits: Implications for evolutionary psychologists

Kock¹

2011

Journal of Evolutionary Psychology

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Abstract. Sexually reproducing organisms often rely on various traits to judge the attractiveness of potential mates. Many mate choice preferences and traits have evolved through selection by those organisms' ancestors, with traits having been either costly (detrimental to survival) or noncostly in the environment of their evolutionary adaptation. A general mathematical analysis of the evolution of traits used in mate choice is presented. The analysis builds on a combination of Price's covariance equation and Wright's method of path analysis, and includes a set of Monte Carlo simulations. The usefulness of the mathematical analysis is demonstrated through the development of a small but important set of hypotheses and implications for the human species: (1) costly traits used in mate choice by humans should be generally less common and more attractive to the other sex than non-costly traits; (2) costly traits should be disproportionately less common in human females than in males; and (3) some harmful human mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, may have co-evolved as costs of attractive mental traits. It is also shown that similar analyses can be easily employed by evolutionary psychologists to theorize about the evolution of complex mate choice traits, and to test the resulting theories with modern humans through the method of path analysis.

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Section: The Limits On the Number Of Independent Traits Used In Mate mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Examples Of Exploratory Theorizing Based On the Mathematicalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A mathematical analysis of the evolution of human mate choice traits: Implications for evolutionary psychologists

Kock¹

2011

Journal of Evolutionary Psychology

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“…Indeed, skin redness has since been shown to be associated with both perceived health and attractiveness (Stephen et al 2009(Stephen et al , 2012 in facial rating studies. Furthermore, relating color attributes to attractiveness ratings, Fink et al (2001) found that attractiveness was negatively correlated with variability in blue color space in women's faces, but was also predicted by homogeneity of contrast, suggesting that both color and textural cues influence judgments. In subsequent studies, Fink and colleagues showed that both homogeneity of skin color distribution and skin surface topography predicts perception of attractiveness, age and health in women's (Fink et al 2006;Fink and Matts 2008) and men's faces (Fink et al 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It has been argued, for example, that men prefer women with relatively pale skin as this is associated with youth (van den Berghe and Frost 1986, but see Fink et al 2001) and that redness of cheeks could be a signal of health (Zahavi and Zahavi 1997). Indeed, skin redness has since been shown to be associated with both perceived health and attractiveness (Stephen et al 2009(Stephen et al , 2012 in facial rating studies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discrimination of Attractiveness and Health in Men’s Faces: the Impact of Color Cues and Variation in Relation to Sex and Age of Rater

Roberts

Little

DeBruine

et al. 2017

Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology

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Cues available in facial skin are used to assess mate quality in humans and non-human primates. In men, perception of skin healthiness and facial attractiveness are associated with heterozygosity at genes in the major histocompatibility complex, with potential implications for securing direct benefits through mate choice. There is, however, some debate as to the precise nature of the information available in skin that is used in health and attractiveness judgments. Here we investigate whether color cues are important in discrimination of skin healthiness and facial attractiveness in men's faces. We presented images of men judged to have attractive or unattractive faces, and healthy or less healthy skin, to independent raters in either full-color or gray-scale monochrome. Differences in ratings across these conditions indicate that hue carries additive information over that available in other skin cues (e.g. texture and tone) and that this aids discrimination of individual men's quality, especially in judgments of skin condition. We also found significant sex and age effects on discrimination. Our results are consistent with findings from other species that color cues can signal underlying quality and that sexual selection may have contributed to the evolution of color vision in primates.

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Physical Attractiveness in Adaptationist Perspective

Sugiyama¹

2015

The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology

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The literature on human attractiveness spans the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and dates back at least to the time of Plato. Consequently, scholars across the disciplines have proposed and investigated a variety of ideas about what makes some people more or less attractive than others (e.g., Etcoff, 1999). Addressing this vast literature from an adaptationist perspective is well beyond the scope of this chapter. This chapter limits itself to (1) outlining an adaptationist perspective on physical attractiveness, (2) presenting the basic questions that this perspective leads us to ask,(3) reviewing some important empirical advances in the answering of these questions, and (4) highlighting research avenues calling for increased attention. I argue that human physical attractiveness assessment is generated by adaptations functioning to evaluate evolutionarily relevant cues to human social value across multiple domains of interaction (e.g., kin, mating, cooperation) and that evolutionary human life history theory and data from small-scale foraging societies are instrumental in generating predictions about these domains of social value and the cues associated with them.Multiple, converging lines of evidence are, useful to test whether a given phenotypic trait is an adaptation (e.g., Symons, 1989;Tooby & Cosmides, 1990). In the case of complex adaptations (e.g., immune systems, social exchange reasoning, or attractiveness-assessment psychologies), the most compelling case is made when there is evidence that: (1) the species in question recurrently faced a particular adaptive problem during recent evolutionary history, (2) the structure in question has a complex functional design that is so improbably well-suited to solving that adaptive problem that we are forced to reject pure chance as an alternative hypothesis, and (3) the organism in question shares with all normal conspecifics that design or a facultative developmental program that builds that design.

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Human (Homo sapiens) facial attractiveness in relation to skin texture and color.

Cited by 272 publications

References 35 publications

A mathematical analysis of the evolution of human mate choice traits: Implications for evolutionary psychologists

A mathematical analysis of the evolution of human mate choice traits: Implications for evolutionary psychologists

Discrimination of Attractiveness and Health in Men’s Faces: the Impact of Color Cues and Variation in Relation to Sex and Age of Rater

Physical Attractiveness in Adaptationist Perspective

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