the way we express and communicate
ourselves to others doesn't just happen
verbally our physical presence plays an
important role too it's clear that
visual first impressions count whether
you're making new friends
networking at a job interview or on a
first date it's long been known that
so-called attractive people can get
better outcomes in most walks of life
but what is attraction and the factors
that affect our perception is beauty
really in the eye of the beholder i want
to explore the impact of physical beauty
how different societies display
attraction and how it has evolved and
changed over time
this is inescapable and it's as old as
we are as a species i think the
preference is really linked to
reproductive potential for women in the
workplace there is such a thing as being
too attractive what science does is it
gives the illusion that the observer is
being objective
i began by speaking to the art historian
and expert in tattooing dr matt lauder
he explained that creative symbolic
practice appeared as early as 45 000
years ago
the idea of self-fashioning of
self-creation of symbolic communication
in a what we might call decorative way
is something that's pretty consistent
actually pretty fundamental to the human
experience tattoos for instance have
been discovered dating back to the 5th
or 6th century bce from remains in the
siberian permafrost to ancient egyptian
mummies
in the egyptian mummies the images seem
more symbolic so perhaps they're just
decorative more likely they're part of
some kind of sort of social
identification some symbolic function in
a social context in terms of ancient
cosmetic surgery or body modification we
find a lot of that across the world
there are examples from india of
important figures having noses
reconstructed we find bound skulls
everywhere from latin america from south
america to france binding of the head of
a baby before the skull firms up to
creative particular elongation either
for status purposes or for aesthetic
purposes or both in australia we find
the sub-incision of the penis and it
also is found in brazil which has ritual
and sexual and magical associations we
find lots of dental modification
sharpening of teeth insertion of jewels
into the teeth again across the world it
really is this kind of basic human
instinct to modify and change our
appearance you know either permanently
or semi-apparently
there are believed to be many reasons
behind these ancient physical practices
they can be defined as indicating status
as well as attracting mates for fashion
purposes or simply to conform to social
norms but this can also be skewed by our
current understanding of the past
for a long time tattoos on ancient
egyptian mummies because they were
largely found on female mummies were
presumed by victorian edwardian
anthropologists and egyptologists to be
indicative of kind of sex work and
prostitution new research really has
sort of proven that that's not the case
and that these women these female
figures their lives and their social
roles were complicated and won't be
reduced to this modern
stereotype body bonsification is one
thing i want to consider some of the
scientific research surrounding beauty
and attraction in terms of our own
physical features and understand what's
important when it comes to make
choices in fully you take a picture and
you copy paste the left side on the
right side you're gonna end up with a
weird face it's really not really
natural but if you have like a really
nice way of creating a nice stimulus
then increasing symmetry is going to
increase attractness until a certain
point it matters but you can't look for
the perfect symmetrical face either if
you're really looking at sexual
attraction i think the preference is
really linked to reproductive potential
we live longer but
women still have a lower fertility when
the age physical traits in men are not
really linked to their reproductive
potential i know really muscular male is
not going to really make you have like
healthier children or more children
which is different when we talk about
female attractiveness having a baby for
a woman is really really costly for our
bodies and it's not the case for me
what's deemed beautiful from culture to
culture is vastly different
i spoke to the science journalist and
author angela saney whose work often
scrutinizes and unpicks our prejudices
and biases
there are evolutionary biologists out
there for instance who've tried to make
claims about what is more desirable and
what's more attractive to a potential
mate but i think it's very hard to make
those kind of generalizations because as
we know different cultures have
different standards of beauty this idea
of thinness or even of certain
waist hip ratios and things like that
they're not necessarily shared
everywhere in the world we have evidence
for instance looking at neolithic and
paleolithic sites and there are many
female figurines that we have from nine
ten thousand years ago and almost
exclusively they're very voluptuous
they've been described in the academic
literature by some men as obese because
they're very very large women sometimes
saggy clearly older some of them that
they've had many children and their
bodies show evidence of that and who's
to say that in those human societies
people didn't find that beautifully
attractive even though that in some
societies now we don't
to make matters more complicated it's
hard to be objective about beauty as we
are all affected by our societal
zeitgeist such as racial and cultural
biases dependent on where and when we
lived when francis galton who was
darwin's cousin in the late 19th early
20th centuries started looking at human
difference he was one of the one of the
people who founded the field of eugenics
and when he started it looking at who
had beneficial traits and who didn't he
even tried to drop a beauty map of
britain so he traveled the country he
would look at women and decide who were
the more beautiful who weren't the more
beautiful and then map them according to
his standard of beauty and of course
there's nothing objective about that
because what you find beautiful and
really up to you but what science does
is it gives the illusion that the
observer is being objective
when it comes to the long-held claims
surrounding waste to hit ratio in women
dr jean bouvey found that it's not that
simple
we looked at artwork through paintings
and sculpture so we went into museum to
collect data and i started the project
thinking okay i'm going to find that the
wastewater pressure was almost always
the same through history when you were
trying to depict a beautiful woman that
was not actually true it was relatively
consistent the western pressure depicted
in in artworks through history was
relatively low meaning feminine but
we could see some variation according to
time it was a bit contradictory to the
hypothesis that the wastewater pressure
is a universally attractive trait
certain physical traits are important
for reproduction there is generally an
overwhelming emphasis on female
attractiveness and body shape however
the pressure should not only be placed
on women research shows that men too
have biological clocks sperm quantity
and quality rapidly declines as men age
and although this is not easy to
identify via physical traits it
certainly is when it comes to age just
as beauty standards change and are far
from objective how we understand and
interpret the weight put on biological
features also needs to be factored in
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