Healthy body, healthy face? Evolutionary approaches to attractiveness perception

The human face contains a large amount of observable information about the bearer, providing cues to age, sex, ethnic group and emotional state. Observers also make spontaneous judgements about more appar-ently subjective attributes, such as how attractive they consider the face to be. Recent developments in evolutionary psychology suggest that these perceptions of attractiveness may not be so subjective after all, and may in fact reflect aspects of the underlying health and fertility of the bearer. In order for a cue to health to be valid, however, it must both relate to the actual health of the bearer and be perceived as healthy and/or attractive by observers (Coetzee, Perrett & Stephen, 2009; Fig. 1). In this chapter, we will introduce the theoretical approaches to attractiveness research, and discuss the evidence for health cues in the face and agreement and variation in face preferences.21 page(s