Students claim beauty is in the eye of fertility

[abdulhakeem]

November 02 2005

IT is not just about a pretty face. If a group of Scottish psychologists are to be believed, attractiveness is not a matter of wit, intelligence, or sense of humour either.

No, girls having a pretty face depends on oestrogen, and lots of it.

Although it hardly comes as a surprise that most men prefer pretty girls, the team of psychologists at St Andrews University now believe they have discovered the reason.

The research team, led by Miriam Law Smith, a final year psychology PhD student, claims to have found a link between attractive women and higher levels of fertility.

Their findings undermine the notion that beauty is a social or cultural product, or even a subjective concept whereby one man's Angelina Jolie is another man's Ann Widdecombe.

Beauty, they have concluded, is in the eye of biology – that is, the more oestrogen a woman has, the more fertile she is likely to be, which, thanks to evolutionary instinct, will make her more attractive to men and increase her pulling power.

However, medical experts expressed scepticism over the findings, warning that it was presumptuous to make such connections and that the complexities of male–female attraction cannot be attributed to a single hormone.

While the researchers stress that this correlation is not absolute, and that other factors can affect attractiveness, they argue this general link could explain why men are attracted to certain partners.

Law Smith, 27, said: "In evolutionary terms, it makes sense for men to favour feminine fertile women, those that did would have had more babies."

Dr Mark Hamilton, a consultant gynaecologist at Aberdeen Maternity Hospital, said: "To make this conclusion requires an incredible leap of faith. There are many factors involved and to single out a single hormone I think would be unwise."

http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/50014.html

[abdulhakeem]

Study: Makeup covers natural allure

November 03, 2005
UPI

Makeup may help less attractive women catch men's eyes but it masks the natural glow of more attractive, estrogen-rich women, Scottish researchers say.

In a four-week study of 56 female students, University of St. Andrews researchers photographed them with and without makeup and monitored their hormone levels -- a key indicator of fertility, the London Daily Mail reported.

Men found the makeup-free faces of women high in estrogen more attractive than those with lower levels of the hormone. Makeup, however, confused males into thinking a given woman was more fertile, and thus attractive, than she really was, researchers said.

The use of makeup may compensate for or mask cues indicating low hormone levels, researchers said of the study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The finding fits with research earlier this year that found 68 percent of men prefer natural beauty to cosmetics, the newspaper reported.

http://news.webindia123.com/news/showdetails.asp?id=152694&n_date=20051103&cat=World

[abdulhakeem]

Hormones 'make women prettier'

Wed 2 Nov 2005
LAURA ROBERTS

BEAUTY is not just skin deep, but is inextricably linked to a woman's fertility and health, according to new research into attractiveness.

Scientists who showed men the faces of young women found that women with higher levels of oestrogen were rated as more attractive, healthy and feminine-looking than those with lower levels. The research suggests a deep-rooted evolutionary link between beauty and reproductive fitness which has helped men to identify mates who will bear them large numbers of offspring.

Psychologist Miriam Law Smith, who led the team of psychologists at St Andrew University's Perception Lab, said: "The relationships between oestrogen and appearance in natural images of faces found here are important because they are the first evidence for a link between facial femininity and oestrogen that has previously been assumed in facial attractiveness research.

"The associations of oestrogen with attractiveness and health ratings also provide evidence that markers of oestrogen are consistently seen as attractive and healthy. These detectable cues to reproductive hormones may have shaped male preferences, and could therefore provide an adaptive explanation for the cross-cultural tendency for feminine faces to be found most attractive."

Ms Law Smith added: "Women are effectively advertising their general fertility with their faces. Our findings could explain why men universally seem to prefer feminine women's faces.

"In evolutionary terms, it makes sense for men to favour feminine fertile women, those that did would have had more babies."

The research is the latest in a series of experiments conducted by researchers at St Andrews which have shed new light on attraction. The team has discovered that, contrary to popular myth, people are not attracted to partners with similar facial features.

When shown pairs of pictures, people chose the face of a stranger as the most sexually attractive. However, people looking at faces that looked similar to them identified them as more trustworthy.

In fact, men and women found people of the opposite sex who looked like them physically unattractive, which scientists said was a subconscious attempt to avoid the taboo of incest. Researchers describe this as instinctive "inbreeding avoidance" which uses facial resemblance as a cue to identifying potential family members.

Dr Nick Neave, Evolutionary Psychologist at Northumbria University, said that looking at faces is a good indicator of male sexual hormone testosterone and oestrogen levels.

"You only have to compare the faces of Arnie and Miss World. A feminine face is rounder with gentle features, big eyes, small nose and big lips. While women invest more in their partner, men really just want someone young and pretty who is fertile.

"After the menopause, women's faces change as oestrogen levels drop and they become more masculine."

Dr Ben Jones, who runs the Face Laboratory at Aberdeen University, said: "When rating the attractiveness of female faces, people tend to a kind of evolutionary agreement.

"Oestrogen is an indicator of fertility and overall health. Attractive women may be more medically healthy and able to produce children. Women's faces even change according to different times of their menstrual cycle and are often thought most attractive when at their most fertile."

Dr Jones continued: "Men from all cultures and all backgrounds find similar faces attractive. They are drawn to a babyish face and big baby-like eyes with arched eyebrows which seem consistent with high oestrogen levels.

"Attractive people with attractive faces are the sort of people who would make good mates so there is an evolutionary advantage to this choice.

"Women are less uniform in their tastes."

But author Jilly Cooper said yesterday: "It sounds like another silly theory. Sex appeal is about scent and charisma. You don't know if you want to go to bed with someone until you kiss them.

"Barbara Streisand has got sex appeal and she hasn't got a little nose or big eyes."

http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=2180992005

[Arsalan]

izit coz oestrogen helps release thise chemicals called pheremones, which whifff out of the body n thence for example hieghten sexual attraction in certain creatures apart for human beings.

do humans have pheremones?

if so where can i get some

safe.

[abdulhakeem]

Hormone levels predict attractiveness of women

02 November 2005
Gala Vince
NewScientist.com news service

http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/dn8251/dn8251-1_250.jpg

Enlarge image (http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/dn8251/dn8251-1_650.jpg)
These are the computer-generated composite face of the 10 women with highest and lowest levels of oestrogen - which do you find more attractive? Answers at the end of the story (Image: Miriam Law Smith)

Feminine beauty, the subject of philosophical and artistic musings for millennia, can be predicted by something as basic as hormones – in women, but not men. Researchers at the University of St Andrews in Fife, UK, have found that women’s facial attractiveness is directly related to their oestrogen levels.
Miriam Law Smith and colleagues photographed 59 women, aged between 18 and 25, every week for six weeks. On each occasion, they provided a urine sample for hormone analysis and gave information on where they were in their menstrual cycle. None of the women wore make-up, nor were they taking the contraceptive pill.

The researchers then selected the photograph of each woman that had been taken at the time of her highest urine-oestrogen level. As expected, this correlated to the point of ovulation in the women’s menstrual cycles. These photographs were rated by 14 men and 15 women, also aged 18 to 25, for attractiveness, health and femininity.

The group also rated two composite face images. One composite was an amalgamation of the 10 women with the lowest peak-oestrogen levels, while the other image was a combination of the 10 women with the highest levels (see image).

Facial formation

“There was a very strong and direct correlation between the level of each woman's oestrogen and how attractive, healthy and feminine they were found to be, showing that fertility is related to attractiveness,” Law Smith told New Scientist. The faces considered most healthy and feminine were also deemed the most attractive.

“It is likely that those women with higher hormone levels also had increased levels of oestrogen during puberty – the time when the hormone has a crucial role in determining facial appearance,” she suggests.

The amount of oestrogen produced by a person’s body during the average seven-year-long puberty is largely determined by heredity. The hormone has lasting effects on bone growth and tissue formation as well as the skin’s appearance, Law Smith explains.

So should 13-year-old girls be given doses of oestrogen in the hope that they will grow into more beautiful women? “Absolutely not,” Law Smith says. “It certainly may make them more attractive, but who knows what other effects the hormone may have?"

Of course there may be an easier way - faking it. A further study by Law Smith's group found that when women wore make-up the correlation between perceived attraction and oestrogen levels was completely masked, because make-up improved appearance.

Image answers: The left-hand composite faces was from women with the highest oestrogen levels, and was judged more attractive than the composite face on the right, from women with the lowest levels of oestrogen.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8251

[abdulhakeem]

izit coz oestrogen helps release thise chemicals called pheremones, which whifff out of the body n thence for example hieghten sexual attraction in certain creatures apart for human beings.

do humans have pheremones?

if so where can i get some

safe.i suppose u cant smell pheromones on pix ;)

[Siddiqa]

izit coz oestrogen helps release thise chemicals called pheremones, which whifff out of the body n thence for example hieghten sexual attraction in certain creatures apart for human beings.

do humans have pheremones?

if so where can i get some

safe.

Pheromones are found in both sexes. So, it's really not exclusive to the female gender. There are released differently. The sweat glands serve to release pheromones, as do other glands.

There is a lot of info out is being sought on how to make or extract pheromones. Would serve to make someone very rich for sure. Some perfumes even claim the use of it.

[Hekmaa]

can we follow the arguement through, that rich person is going to have alot of rapists on his bill. Thats going by the amount of perfume women put compared to guys hahahaha