Balancing Act
Newsweek, June 3, 1996 v127 n23 p60(7). Excerpt from The biology of beauty, (Cover Story) Geoffrey Cowley.
One key to physical attractiveness is symmetry; humans, like other species,
show a strong preference for individuals whose right and left sides are well matched.
Denzel Washington’s face, on the left, is almost completely symmetrical.
Lyle Lovett’s, on the right, is not — as revealed by a computerized image made up of his left side repeated on the right.
No one suggests that points of attraction never vary. Rolls of fat can signal high status in a poor society or low status in a rich one, and lip plugs go over better in the Kalahari than they do in Kansas. But local fashions seem to rest on a bedrock of shared preferences. You don’t have to be Italian to find Michelangelo’s David better looking than, say, Alfonse D’Amato.
When British researchers asked women from England, China and India to rate pictures of Greek men, the women responded as if working from the same crib sheet. And when researchers at the University of Louisville showed a diverse collection of faces to whites, Asians and Latinos from 13 countries, the subjects’ ethnic background scarcely affected their preferences.
To a skeptic, those findings suggest only that Western movies and magazines have overrun the world. But scientists have found at least one group that hasn’t been exposed to this bias. In a series of groundbreaking experiments, psychologist Judith Langlois of the University of Texas, Austin, has shown that even infants share a sense of what’s attractive. In the late ’80s, Langlois started placing 3- and 6-month-old babies in front of a screen and showing them pairs of facial photographs. Each pair included one considered attractive by adult judges and one considered unattractive. In the first study, she found that the infants gazed significantly longer at “attractive" white female faces than at “unattractive” ones. Since then, she has repeated the drill using white male faces, black female faces, even the faces of other babies, and the same pattern always emerges. “These kids don’t read Vogue or watch TV,” Langlois says. “They haven’t been touched by the media. Yet they make the same judgments as adults.”
What, then, is beauty made of? What are the innate rules we follow in sizing each other up? We’re obviously wired to find robust health a prettier sight than infirmity, “All animals are attracted to other animals that are healthy, that are clean by their standards and that show signs of competence,” says Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher. As far as anyone knows, there isn’t a village on earth where skin lesions, head lice and rotting teeth count as beauty aids. But the rules get subtler than that. Like scorpion flies, we love symmetry. And though we generally favor average features over unusual ones, the people we find extremely beautiful share certain exceptional qualities.