male preference for women with a low waist-to-hip ratio

Douglas W. Yu, Sophie Miller.

Nature 396, 321-322 (26 November 1998) | doi:10.1038/24512

Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?

Douglas W. Yu¹ & Glenn H. Shepard, Jr²

Top of page

Abstract

Why are some humans considered more beautiful than others? Theory suggests that sexually reproducing organisms should choose mates displaying characters indicative of high genotypic or phenotypic quality¹. Attraction to beautiful individuals may therefore be an adaptation for choosing high-quality mates^{2, 3, 4, 5, 6}. Culturally invariant standards of beauty in humans have been taken as evidence favouring such an adaptationist explanation of attraction^{3, 4, 5, 6, 7}; however, if standards of beauty are instead no more than artefacts of culture, they should vary across cultures^{3, 4, 5, 6}. Here we show that male preference for women with a low waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) is not culturally universal, as had previously been assumed.