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Face and Body: Independent Predictors of Women’s Attractiveness

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Abstract

Women’s faces and bodies are both thought to provide cues to women’s age, health, fertility, and personality. To gain a stronger understanding of how these cues are utilized, we investigated the degree to which ratings of women’s faces and bodies independently predicted ratings of women’s full-body attractiveness. Women came into the lab not knowing they would be photographed. In Study 1 (N = 84), we photographed them in their street clothes; in Study 2 (N = 74), we photographed women in a solid-colored two-piece swimsuit that revealed their body shape, body size, and breast size. We cropped each woman’s original photo into an additional face-only photo and body-only photo; then, independent sets of raters judged women’s pictures. When dressed in their original clothes, women’s face-only ratings were better independent predictors of full-body attractiveness ratings than were their body-only ratings. When cues displayed in women’s bodies were made conspicuous by swimsuits, ratings of faces and bodies were similarly strong predictors of full-body attractiveness ratings. Moreover, women’s body mass index and waist-to-hip ratio were tied to ratings of women’s body attractiveness, with waist-to-hip ratio more important among women wearing swimsuits than among women wearing their original clothes. These results suggest that perceivers attend to cues of women’s health, fertility, and personality to the extent that they are visible.

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Notes

  1. To check on our request to women that they maintain a neutral expression, outside judges also rated the degree to which each woman was smiling; mean scores were 3.1 on a scale that ranged from 1 to 9. Controlling for ratings of women’s smiling did not alter the findings we reported in the text.

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded by Grants from the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. We thank three anonymous reviewers and Bryan Donovan, Eric Hanley, Luke Heidtke, Jenna Kelley, Katelyn Morrison, Danielle Ryan, and Philip Rechek for feedback on previous drafts of this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Psychology Department, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, 255 Hibbard Hall, Eau Claire, WI, 54702, USA

    April Bleske-Rechek & Carolyn M. Kolb

  2. Psychology Department, California State University at Fullerton, Fullerton, CA, USA

    Amy Steffes Stern

  3. Psychology Department, Ball State University, Muncie, IN, USA

    Katherine Quigley

  4. Psychology Department, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, TN, USA

    Lyndsay A. Nelson

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  1. April Bleske-Rechek
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  2. Carolyn M. Kolb
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  3. Amy Steffes Stern
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  4. Katherine Quigley
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  5. Lyndsay A. Nelson
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Correspondence to April Bleske-Rechek.

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Bleske-Rechek, A., Kolb, C.M., Stern, A.S. et al. Face and Body: Independent Predictors of Women’s Attractiveness. Arch Sex Behav 43, 1355–1365 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-014-0304-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-014-0304-4

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