I figure there’s no sense denying that when it comes to dating, love and relationships, physical attractiveness matters. We’re visually perceptive and we infer a lot from how people look. We don’t do it consciously, either, so there’s no real way to avoid it.
Whether that’s right or wrong, that’s just how we humans work. The research clearly shows that whether or not people say they value physical attractiveness they still base their actions on it. Hell, even the people who truly believe that they don’t care about physical attractiveness still care about it just as much as everyone else when it comes down to who they actually date. (study, study)
These studies show that both men and women place a great deal of importance on physical attractiveness. And we’ve written a companion article on male attractiveness, too. Now, this isn’t to say that physical attractiveness is all that matters. Other attractive traits include warmness and compassion, earning potential, and so on. And yet, surprisingly, these traits are seemingly far less important, at least at first.
Is that the best way to pick a partner? Who knows. Probably not. However this isn’t an article about what we should find attractive, this is an article about what we do find attractive. Some of it might surprise you. Most people guess incorrectly about quite a bit of it. Just in case you disagree though, I’ll cite all my sources so that you can draw your own conclusions.
On that note, this article is long. I’ll understand if you don’t want to read the whole thing, so here’s a quick and simple trick to make yourself instantly sexier: have a drink. It will boost your attractiveness (to yourself) by 50%. This is called the reverse beer goggles effect, aka, Beauty is in the Eye of the Beer Holder. (study) Best of all, you don’t even need to have a real drink – the placebo effect is more than enough – you only have to think you’re having a real drink. (The placebo group also experienced the benefit.)
The funny thing is, they may actually be remarkably healthy. For example, the thin gal may have a slender bone structure, have a naturally small appetite, eat lots of nutritious foods, and really enjoy forms of exercise that make her smaller – jogging, yoga, aerobics, etc. She may be in amazing shape even though she doesn’t look that strong or curvaceous.
Similarly, the naturally heavier gal may be a professional rugby player who exercises for several hours each day and eats a ton of nutritious food. She may be in excellent shape and excellent health, just with a higher body fat percentage.
… Or they may not be. The thin gal may be someone who doesn’t eat well enough to support muscle growth or someone who doesn’t exercise at all. Since muscle is so closely correlated with strength, she surely isn’t as strong as she could be.
And the plumper gal may be someone who doesn’t eat well, eats too much and doesn’t exercise. Since excess weight around the midsection is so closely correlated with health problems, if her lifestyle isn’t a healthy one she may be flirting with something like heart disease or diabetes.
These girls may be healthy, but they aren’t conspicuously healthy. Whether our instinctual judgements are fair or not, it’s hard to tell.
There’s nothing wrong with looking like a gal of average health who’ll live till she’s 81, but looking like the national average sure won’t get you noticed … especially when there are the rarer and more remarkable physiques of women who look like they’ll surely live to 120:
If you’re looking for a more wholesome and longer-lasting aesthetic improvement, or perhaps an improvement that other people will notice too, don’t worry – that’s what the rest of this article is all about. This is an article about the biology and physiology of gut-level irresistible attraction, and exactly what it looks like.
Now I’m not saying that average bodies aren’t attractive – they are – what I’m saying is that they aren’t necessarily invading our minds with the uncontrollable urges that a fiery hot impressively healthy gal would. They just aren’t the bodies whose scents draw us compulsively in like a freshly baked Cinnabon.
So let’s look into what’s actually optimally attractive so you can turn even more heads and drop even more jaws than you already d