Kiss, Marry, Avoid? An Evolutionary Perspective on Men’s Facial Attractiveness

Understanding what makes someone attractive is an important part of human mate choice. Features women may find attractive in men include facial masculinity and facial hair. According to the trade-off theory of mate choice, masculinity should be preferred for short-term relationships, due to its association with resources and genetic health, but not preferred for long-term relationships, as a result of increased social costs such as aggression and infidelity. Consequently, this thesis investigated whether relationship context (i.e. short-term versus long-term) influences women’s mate preferences. As expected, a systematic review found that these contexts have not been consistently operationalised across the mate-choice literature. A subsequent validation study then created and tested new definitions of relationship contexts, and found as predicted that different relationship labels (short-term, long-term, friend, father) describe different relationships. An experimental study then used these definitions to investigate how relationship context influences women’s preferences for two sexually dimorphic features in men; facial masculinity and facial hair. Women were asked to rate faces of men which varied in degree of facial masculinity (low, neutral, high) and facial hair (clean-shaven, bearded) for their attractiveness across different relationship contexts. Results indicated a general preference for facial hair over clean-shaven faces, and a dislike for low masculinity faces compared with neutral and high masculinity. Friends were rated as the most attractive relationship overall. Contrary to predicted, preferences for facial masculinity and facial hair did not interact with relationship context. As such, these results fail to provide support for a trade-off in women’s preferences for facial masculinity. Additionally, they call into question the use of relationship context as a construct within the mate-choice literature