Although beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, research reminds us that all human beholders have essentially the same eye. Ever since evolutionary psychologists turned their gaze to the question of female beauty, they noted a striking correlation. Almost all of the most beautiful women, the sex symbols from many ages, had one thing in common despite the apparently changeable nature of fashion. Nearly all women considered significantly beautiful had a waist-to-hip ratio of .7 to .8. For a long time, it was considered that this was a product of Western media, a phenomenon localized in both space and time. This conclusion was based at least partly on the discovery of the Venus of Willendorf, a stone-age statuette that ostensibly portrayed the ideal of beauty from the period it was made, between 24,000-22,000 BCE.
However, the purpose of the statuette is completely unknown: it may be actually a weight-loss totem, intended to appease the Fat Goddess, who then doesn’t punish the bearer with fat. This isn’t much crazier than some of the diet claims I’ve seen on late-night TV, and it brings up the point that we shouldn’t be too hasty to make judgements based on very fragmentary evidence. Much more reliable is data from cultural sources that are plentiful enough to give context to one another.
For example, a great deal of Greco-Roman sculpture remains, enough to give statistical significance to findings, and with context that shows these statues were intended to be beautiful, such as naming the statue Venus (rather than having that moniker applied post facto). Studies of these statues indicates that they also share the same waist-to-hip ratio as dominated Western sex symbols. Of course, the Greco-Roman culture is the foundation of Western art, so it makes sense that we might derive our values of beauty from their statuary.
But a more recent study of 345,000 texts from the United States, Britain, China, and India, from the first century to the present confirmed the earlier hypothesis. According to the study, the ideal of the slim waist has been relatively constant over history. Although the breasts are the most commonly mentioned feature, the waistline is also a prominent feature, and is always referred to as narrow when beautiful. This holds true for both men and women.
This cultural study follows a biological study that women with “hourglass figures,” i.e. large breasts, narrow waists, and wide hips, had much higher levels of hormones that predict their ability to become pregnant.
Together, these studies provide both the evidence of universality for the narrow waist, as well as an evolutionary mechanism selecting for the trait, and they explain the prominence of several types of cosmetic surgery procedures. It explains, for example, the popularity of liposuction for men and women. And abdominoplasty is also popular among both sexes. Furthermore, the perennial popularity of breast augmentation, not only in the United States but around the world is also given credibility by these studies, not to mention the increasing popularity of buttock augmentation.
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