I was asked recently about what beauty means.

If you are wondering why I might be asked such a question, then the answer is because I have been on the telly a few times to speak about this issue.

There is a curious connection between genetics and sex and beauty and it goes like this.

Consider that you look at a person and immediately decide that they are attractive. Why did you just discriminate? Why does such a thing exist in the first place?

We decide that some people are attractive while others are less so and some we do not consider attractive at all.

We decide which category we put a person into within a fraction of a second of seeing them.

Funny that. You decide immediately.

Everybody does, more or less.

I’m going to say that it is genetic.

The definition of beauty (as evidenced by a rating of photos by a large cohort of people, followed by a ranking of the photos and then a computer based analysis of the photos) seems to depend on three things. Facial symmetry. Facial averageness. Skin tone and colour. Faces are deemed immediately to be more attractive if they are more symmetrical. However, being symmetrical, but with unusual proportions is not considered so attractive. The more average the face, the more attractive it is considered. Skin colour and tone preferences vary with racial groups, geography etc.

Brad Pitt here is quite average in the looks department.

Anyway, why do we even make the distinction? Why do we consider some people attractive and others not?

Well, facial symmetry can change during a person’s lifetime. It can depend on the person’s health, both physical and mental. So, considering a person to be attractive is possibly related in some way to picking up cues about health. If a person is more symmetrical, more average in facial features and if they have ‘nice’ skin tones and colour, then we are more attracted to them, on average.

In humans, we give away half our genetics in having offspring. We do not reproduce clonally and we need a partner to contribute half the genes to our offspring.

Therefore, we would like our offspring to have the best genes possible. So, anything that improves the genetics of our offspring will increase the chances that our own genes will make it into the next generation and beyond. Picking poor genetic partners can mean that our own genes have a reduced chance of survival.

So, we have ‘learned’ or perhaps I might say that our genes have learned to identify healthier individuals and we have also learned to like them more and to want to have sex with them more. We have learned to discriminate between somebody that is beautiful and somebody that is not.

Science is pretty cruel, isn’t it?

Anyway, my next post on this issue will be about how to make yourself more attractive.

Comments and questions welcome.