Most women have never heard a frank discussion of what makes a woman sexy in their whole lives. To act decorously and to spare feelings, most men won’t be honest about their deep perversions. And when they are, it is difficult to tell who is weird and who is deeply average. Women have been left to pass hearsay, gossip, and marketing copy to each other.
I think I have a decent understanding of attractiveness because I’m au fait with the scientific literature and its pitfalls, vain enough to be interested, and in possession of the psychological fortitude to be secure against ego-defensive cope. You might describe me as ‘The Uberfrau’. Also, as you may have noticed from my long-absense from this blog, I’ve done several months’ worth of research into the matter to refine my thinking.
I have already written practical advice for getting sexier. If that’s all you’re interested in, go and read that.
You can also jump to the section you are most interested in
Types of evidence
All good infodumps start with a screed on epistemics. Here are the different types of evidence I use here. (SKIP if you trust me.)
Academic Evidence
Where possible, I look at what the academic evidence says. Overall the studies can be grouped into two types.
The most typical kind of study shows people pictures and asks them for their opinions. In surveys like this, if the questions are simple (you need to pick between two images) and the sample is well-chosen (it’s all men of a similar demographic) then I consider a small sample to be fine. Most studies, however, are trying to make some complicated point with samples of only 200 (like trying to see whether exposure to Western media makes men prefer slimmer women), in which case I dismiss the whole thing as bunk.
Most of the studies did not use real or realistic photographs of women. I discounted all line drawings and non-human looking shapes but they don’t always show you the images you use. So a few bad papers will have snuck through.
When the available information was sparse, I let a couple of otherwise-weak studies through but only if I thought what they were claiming was uncontroversial and intuitive. Even then, I have tried to signpost it without letting hedging get in the way of the flow of the text.
In the other kind of study, researchers went through libraries of things like Playboy centrefolds, porn sites, and sex doll manufacturers to see what makes money in the sexy lady industry. The average quality of these studies was much better and more reliable.
Celebrities, Only Fans girls, and Instagram models
When academia let me down, I then looked to other places you can find attractive women to look at. I looked at celebrities, Only Fans models and Instagram girls.
I found a list of attractive celebrities and worked down it to check ideas like ‘do men like full lips?’. Unfortunately, famously attractive celebrities are often quite old when they are at their career peak. There were more women in their forties than in their twenties on the top list. Of course, I used pictures of them when they were younger, but you can’t get around the fact that their fame is influenced by things like ‘what movies have they been in recently’ and not just ‘how perfect is their face’.
OnlyFans girls rely far more on their looks. But I still don’t think it’s a perfect example of what men consider to be generally beautiful because I think some successful sex workers are good at finding a small and underserved niche and exploiting that. But I think it still works to double check the information from celebrities.
Finally, I used Instagram models. Obviously, the number of followers a person has has a lot to do with their brand and not just how sexy they are. Rather than look for objective follower counts, I asked my male friends to send me sexy women they like on Instagram or to go to their Reels page and send me any algorithmically-recommended sexy girl content. This was helpful to get a sense of how wide the distribution of preferences fell.
Aella and, to a lesser extent, J Sanilac
Aella has conducted a lot of very high quality research. Her samples are bigger, more robust, and better selected than actual academic research. I have used her findings throughout and, because you browse her datasets yourself, I have used some of her data for my own original research.
J Sanilac has also conducted some original research by making tallies of libraries of AI girls and sex dolls, and I have used some of his statistics and observations too.
AI and anime girls
I used AI and anime girls to see how far men’s preferences extend. If loads of men liked blue-skinned women, this wouldn’t necessarily show up in real porn or real surveys, but I’m sure you’d see it in drawn and generated sex art. As a result, I find libraries of imaginary women to be useful for getting a sense of how far men’s fantasies extend.
My Twitter polls and my friends
When I’ve been trying to get a qualitative sense of what men think, I have been polling my Twitter followers and asking my friends some questions. My friends are mostly functional, professionally successful, and happily married men, so I find their comments helpful.
This is mostly useful for getting a sense of how strong different preferences are.
I don’t think any of these data sources can stand alone, but all together they paint a clear picture.
Don’t be yourself. Be hot instead.
The famous OkCupid Data blog said ‘If you’re a little chubby, play it up. If you have a big nose, play it up. If you have a weird snaggletooth, play it up: statistically, the guys who don’t like it can only help you, and the ones who do like it will be all the more excited.’ Glamor Magazine and Jezebel also repeated this advice.
In her response to Get Sexier, Cartoons Hate Her said ‘People are best off identifying their aesthetic/vibe-based “type,” plus their best features and then maximizing those features as it relates to their overall type.’
I feel like whenever I talk about how most men prefer slimmer women and most men like long and healthy hair, people are always saying, in one way or another, some variation of ‘be yourself’. They reach for isolated examples of chubby chasers or tell me about that one guy who found an adult woman attractive in the most ‘literal gay pedophile’ way possible.
But no one really believes that if every woman just let herself go and ‘leant into’ her naturally high BMI, thinning hair, and masculine jawline, she would do better on the dating market. There are some men who like these things. But there are more than enough women with these traits to meet scant demand.
Sometimes what’s going on is a conflation of two things. I think your vibe – bookish, sporty, goth etc – should be about leaning into something you already are. But you should be conventionally attractive while you do it.
Obviously the reason the ‘pro-types’ side of this debate is so popular is because it lets you do what you already wanted to do already. It’s just like ‘intuitive eating’, ‘be yourself’, and ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. They are soothing words that do nothing to change the material reality of what kinds of diets work, what personalities make friends, and what art people find beautiful.
Considering that it is patently ridiculous to ‘lean into’ having an ugly face or having a bad personality, I think the pro-type side of the debate should attempt to popularise some system for deciding which types are and aren’t worth leaning into. I look forward to seeing their work.
I would call my position the ‘pro-popular beauty’ side. I think most men agree about which features are attractive and you will have the most suitors if you try to look as conventionally attractive as possible.
The one extra finesse I have to this strategy is that I think that there are some cases where you can do better than the median man’s preference because we have good reason to assume that there is a large and underserved minority that is worth catering to and the majority of men don’t find this trait offputting.
Clearly some male preferences are undersupplied and others oversupplied. If a third of men like women with pink hair and a two thirds of men like women with natural hair colours, then dying your hair pink plausibly gets you more suitors.
But in many cases, chasing undersupplied features can cause more harm than good because they can be a turn off to the vast majority of men. Assuming that you’re not just looking for any random person who is attracted to you and wish to apply some discernment and filtering, turning off the majority of the market will hinder your overall husband hunting strategy. However, if you want to be a purveyor of professional sexual services, appealing to an undersupplied minority probably is a good strategy.
About 2% of sex dolls have unnatural hair colours and I think it’s plausible that about 2% of men like unnatural hair colours on real women too. But I don’t think 2% of women, especially not in my social milieu, have unnatural hair colours. Despite that, I don’t recommend that girls chase that particular undersupplied market because most men say they dislike it. I think this isn’t about the innate ugliness of unnatural hair colours but mostly because these colours are generally associated with an aesthetic that is not oriented towards appealing to the heterosexual male taste.
Perhaps if you are conventionally attractive in every other way, an unnatural hair colour could make you more appealing – there is, after all, a reason so many sex workers try it.
I think tattoos, being muscular, unnatural hair, and pixie cuts are all in the bucket of ‘undersupplied but a turnoff to the majority’.
I think a woman in a big city with very good social reasoning could find success by leaning into being muscular or tattooed, but if you’re not already good at being fashionable and popular I wouldn’t risk it. Undersupplied but a turnoff to the majority is a very good strategy for Instagram girls, porn stars, and sex dolls because they are dealing with a large global market and are not discerning about who their customers may be.
There are, however, some features that are not the median man’s taste, are undersupplied on the general market, and are still appealing to the majority of men. In general I think these traits are the extremes of continuous spectra and not discrete buckets. You either have a lip piercing or you don’t have a lip piercing (discrete). But for things like height, hair length and eyebrow thickness (continuous) you can sit a few steps beyond the median man’s preferences but still appeal to him, but gain a gigantic edge over the women who are a few steps on the other side of the median man’s preference.
Say men had a strong height preference (they don’t), you could imagine a universe in which women’s heights are still roughly distributed as they are in the real world but the median man has a preference for 5ft women. The average woman would be taller than the median man’s preferences and so all the men who prefer taller women are well catered to. Being 4ft11 or 4ft10 is probably better than being 5ft, because you would still be appealing to the median 5ft-woman-lover, but you are extra appealing to the extremely uncatered to half of the population that prefers women who are even shorter than 5ft. And a 5ft1 lover will still think you’re pretty cute.
So I think it is wise to modestly overshoot the median man’s preferences on continuous traits but nail it on discrete tastes.
Animals love supernormal stimuli.
People often accuse men who like extreme hyperfeminine proportions as being ‘porn brained’. Implicitly, everyone knows that lots of men find extreme curvaceousness attractive but they also believe that there is something suspect and perhaps Japanese about it. That’s why this goat is described as having ‘gooner proportions’. (‘Gooner’ being slang for a person who enjoys masturbating at the expense of higher pleasures.)
There are unending fights about what characters from video games and comic books should look like, the subtext being that men who like these exaggerated proportions are weird and undateable freaks who don’t know what real women look like. Maybe they are even inherently misogynistic because they’re setting unrealistic standards for women.
I think the men who like ‘gooner proportions’ are essentially normal. This graph from earlier presumes that men’s preferences only exist on a spectrum that includes things that are possible in the real world.
But it’s clear for anyone who samples choice libraries of visual art that there are probably some traits that are distributed more like this.
For these traits, I think the best strategy is to be at the boundary of possible but implausible.
When we think about breasts and hips, it seems dirty and salacious to overshoot typical female phenotypes. But it’s clear when we think about red lipstick, bleach blonde hair, and high heels that the supernormal stimulus isn’t the dirty thing itself. In these cases, it can be classy for women to emphasise natural gender dimorphism.
Also, if we look to the animal kingdom, we see it is very normal for creatures to have a preference for extreme and unnatural things.
Mayflies lay their eggs on water so it was useful for them to evolve an attraction to surfaces that reflect polarized sunlight. There aren’t many other shiny surfaces in nature so, until recently, there was no reason to evolve a desire more complex than ‘lay your eggs somewhere shiny’. Now we have many shiny surfaces, far shiner than water and the mayflies are duly tricked. We call this sort of thing ‘supernormal stimuli’, and these desires can suddenly become maladaptive in the face of modern industry.
Junk food, pornography, and videos of cute cats are all ways of bombarding your senses with things that are better than what you would have ever had access to in ye olde ancestral environment.
When we look at art created to titillate in mediums unconstrained by nature, we see evidence that a lot of men are drawn to supernormal stimuli. In drawn and AI-generated art, women often have very exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics beyond what is natural.
Of course, we should assume that men who like anime girls probably have more extreme preferences than the men who are sated by regular porn (or God forbid, the real world). I don’t take anime girls as proof that most men like a woman with the face of a toddler and Z cup breasts. I take anime girls as proof that the distribution of preferences includes some phenotypes that lie far outside of what nature can deliver.
The next reason you might have to avoid the median man’s preferences is if you think good husbands have different preferences to average men. A lot of people seem to think something like ‘sure, the median man likes blonde hair and large breasts, but he’s probably poor and porn-brained and not worth marrying. A good and rich man likes a curveless androgyne of good breeding.’
I had something like this as a cached thought before I started looking into this stuff. When we get to discussing the empirical evidence for men’s preferences I’ll go into more detail about what the studies show, but for now I will say that the evidence does not suggest what people think it does. If people read further than the abstracts of papers they would see that elite Western men like women who are slim and curvy while poorer men in the developing world like women who are slightly heavier and also still curvy.
Pearl from Steven Universe isn’t a sex icon anywhere, not even Park Avenue.
I think some women think that men who like supernormal stimuli watch a lot of porn and that you would, ideally, avoid a man who watches porn. Whether porn shapes people’s preferences is a massive debate that I won’t wade into. I personally find porn kind of disgusting and for a while entertained radical feminist beliefs about how it was all evil and proved that men were naturally rapists. (If you think TikTok is a tool for radicalisation, you don’t know about life on LiveJournal.) I’ve made my peace with it for a number of reasons but in no small part because, after having dated men and learned their perversions, I realised that there really was no correlation between how nice a man is and how much porn he watches.
Over the years I’ve gotten to know rich and marriageable men who watch lots of porn and fucked up perverts who don’t. I’ve also realised how much of the digital realm is full of softcore porn. Whenever I engage with algorithmic social media I see lots of #relatablejokes and Taylor Swift-themed ragebait. But men who scroll TikTok or Instagram Reels are barraged with videos of pretty ladies in a state of undress, so even if your man isn’t technically watching porn, he probably is seeing a lot of surgically and digitally enhanced women and – if you buy the idea that porn is reshaping men’s preferences – that content is probably also recalibrating his sense of what normal women look like.
Men are lying to you.
Some people asked me why I was so stubborn, considering how many people were telling me I was wrong. For one, I tallied up the results and found there were more positive comments than negative.
But for another, I find – on this topic in particular – people lie all the time. Most men are gallant enough that they won’t say what they find attractive if they think it will offend the women they are talking to. Even in their closest relationships.
One of my friends said that his wife, who has a thing for Timothee Chalamet, is always saying that she can’t understand why Chalamet would date a woman like Kylie Jenner. My friend says to his wife ‘oh yeah, I have no idea what he sees in her’ but confessed to me that he secretly thinks Kylie Jenner is pretty attractive. This is probably the correct attitude for marital felicity but it does mean that she is miscalibrated and may be spreading misinformation.
If you seem neurotic and fighty then your friends won’t tell you things either. Literally yesterday (from writing, not posting) a male friend divulged a highly relevant ethnographic data point which he started with ‘I’m only telling you this because you’re kind of autistic’.
Now, we both know I’m not actually autistic. What he means is he feels comfortable telling me about his masturbation habits because it’s not going to be a thing between us that I have this privileged understanding of his sexual psyche, and I’m not going to treat him any worse if what he says disgusts or bemuses me. I find most women don’t get this privileged view into the male mind because they are judgemental. The one person who I don’t expect to be honest with me is my husband because he, in the interest of marital felicity, has has good reason to lie to me.
After that, people falsify their preferences to seem high status. Skinniness is high status in educated circles because it is a signifier of self control. Tattoos are high status if you’re edgy.
Cumulatively, what this means is that men are going to claim – especially to women – that their preferences are a) more common and attainable and b) more socially acceptable than they actually are.
When I was writing Get Sexier, I was hanging out with friends who are a couple. I asked him who, of all the famous women in the world, he finds the most attractive. Before he answered, she joked that there was one wrong answer – Sydney Sweeney – and then he, artfully, avoided the question.
I don’t have a complete theory about why some preferences are more socially acceptable and high status than others. But I think there’s something about the obviousness of Sydney Sweeney’s hotness that seems crass. Having taste often includes liking something nonobvious for arcane reasons and perhaps that’s just as true of sexy ladies as well as architecture.
Some of it is obviously a psychological defense. If you’re not blonde with big tits, or if your girlfriend isn’t blonde with big tits, then to protect your ego you must deride that form of beauty as not worth having. It’s the same as a downwardly mobile middle class person describing McMansions as tacky.
The media is lying to you about the Madonna/Whore complex
Lots of people said ‘Of course women like Sydney Sweeney are sexy. But men wouldn’t marry her. They’d marry someone more like Taylor Swift.’ Or they (gayly) voted in my Twitter poll to say that they wouldn’t date someone who looked like Megan Fox because she looks ‘low class’.
But I think this divide between women you’d fuck and women you’d marry is wildly exaggerated because people don’t understand their own preferences. When they hear big boobs and a youthful face they pattern match the words I’ve written to the context in which they’re most used to noticing these features – i.e. porn.
So they imagine someone like this.
But the curvaceousness and the neotenous face here aren’t the trashy features. She seems trashy because she’s posing in a leopard print bikini top.
Here’s the same model in normal outfits your wife or girlfriend would wear, smiling.
Of course, the world is very big and people have all kinds of idiosyncratic psychological problems. There are going to be some men who are primarily attracted to one type of woman but will only marry a different kind of woman. I’m not saying there aren’t insane people out there.
You see this very dynamic drive the plot of films like Legally Blonde and I think it’s what you’re meant to read into Carrie and Big’s relationship in Sex in the City. But I am suspicious of fictional evidence and I think this sort of thing is more common in stories than in the real world. Remember, for romance fiction to work, there has to be some kind of tension that keeps the main couple apart.
Wealthy and successful men want a high status wife who will bolster his success and gel with his social set. If you want to bag a man like that, go to a good university, get an impressive job, pick up upper class habits, and find some intelligent things to say at dinner parties. Having too much raw sex appeal is unlikely to be your problem.
Unless he has a bad relationship with his libido, he will want a wife who is sexy. There’s a big difference between having big tits and getting them out at the JP Morgan summer party.
I think only a very small number of men would, all things being equal, choose to be with a woman with a body and face he found less attractive. This type of man isn’t worth chasing and, frankly, you should be worried if you somehow catch one. Surely he is more likely to cheat, bow and scrape to others’ whims regardless of how personally costly they are, be gay, treat you with indifference because he doesn’t desire you, and be less attractive to you because you can’t sense his desire.
Even billionaire’s wives wear makeup
I was surprised at the number of people whose response was ‘makeup? Yuck’. The 2010s internet was full of memes about how makeup is a form of deceit and you should take a woman swimming on the first date. But I thought we had moved past this.
I assume lots of men are frustrated that they have started dating a beautiful woman only to find that, once she is comfortable with him, she reveals a far less attractive face underneath the layers of painstaking effort. They feel catfished. Others are probably annoyed that their wives and girlfriends spend time on beautification routines that actually make them uglier (and late).
Of course, if you’re naturally ugly, then a thick makeup mask probably does make you more beautiful. But for a lot of women, heavy makeup of the kind that looks good in pictures looks bad in real life. People like natural-looking materials. We like sheets made of real linen and furniture made from real wood. ‘Instagram face’ complete with contour and enlarged eyes removes the natural variation of human skin and replaces it with an artificial and plasticy texture.
Also men like neoteny. I think a heavily made up face always looks adult. For most young women, makeup takes them from looking like a normal twenty-something to a hot thirty-something. This, in the eyes of a red-blooded male, is not necessarily an upgrade.
The best makeup styles are natural-ish and are applied with a light hand. But that’s not because men prefer a natural face – celebrities, OnlyFans girls, influences, and the girlfriends and wives of eligible men all wear visible makeup. It’s because human males largely prefer styles that imitate features common on attractive women rather than clowns or birds of paradise.
Forget symmetry, people like average faces
Everyone with a passing interest in this kind of thing knows that people like symmetrical faces. This makes some intuitive sense as very few things in nature are symmetrical except for healthy animals. Having a symmetrical face is a sign that you weren’t inundated with parasites at crucial developmental stages. But, in the world of scientifically-backed beauty advice, facial symmetry is a bit passé, a bit ‘baby’s-first-theory’.
Studies that measure symmetry by mirroring faces, or blending the actual face with its mirror image find that digitally constructed symmetrical faces are actually less attractive than natural faces. This is probably because digitally altered faces are just a little uncanny in a subtle way that undermines the boost that the symmetry gives. Studies that test the attractiveness of faces as they actually appear in the real world find better results for symmetry but that is probably because having a symmetrical face correlates with other important signs of health.
When controlling for things like averageness, femininity and clear skin, symmetry becomes substantially less popular. Basically people do like symmetrical faces but it’s not that important.
So what’s this whole average thing? Why is it so popular? It sounds like a euphemism for mid.
In the science of beauty, an average face is a face that’s closer to the population average. By averaging faces together, you can smooth out weird proportions and sizes, and make a better face overall. Generally, the more faces that make up the composite, the more attractive the face.
My guess is we like average faces because an average face resembles the platonic ideal of a face that you picture in your mind’s eye. Like symmetry, averageness is probably a decent proxy for health. Most of the ways in which a person’s face differs from average are ways in which it can be damaged or poorly formed.
Historical beauties are often surprisingly unattractive despite the fact that painters are probably trying to do flattering renders. I think that, while they are usually painted symmetrically, they often lack facial averageness which makes sense considering they were probably bursting with parasites.
I think this is also why couples can sometimes look more alike than one would naively expect. A person’s sense of what the average face is probably somewhat informed by which faces they saw a lot of when they were young – i.e. the faces of people they are related to, i.e. faces like their own.
But, while there is a lot of agreement about broad trends, when it comes to the most beautiful faces, there is quite a lot of disagreement about who the pinnacle of beauty is. Probably, this is because men prefer different distinctive features to each other. For some, Angelina Jolie is basically ideal. For others her face shape is too angular and masculine and her lips too large.
Femininity vs neoteny (do men prefer women or do they prefer beautiful boys?)
It’s no surprise that men like more feminine faces. Interestingly, women don’t reliably prefer more masculine faces but that’s a whole other discussion and frankly, not my area.
The face on the left is a composite of 60 faces. The face on the right is a composite of the 15 most attractive faces from that set. We can see that the face on the right is very similar but slightly more feminine with darker eyes and fuller and redder lips.
There’s some evidence that the healthier the country the stronger the preference for femininity; with Japanese men liking the most feminine faces. I don’t have a good explanation for this and I’m not sure it’s true. One theory is that in scarcer situations, everyone – men and women alike – prefers more masculine faces. To help this idea, some studies show that more resource insecure women like more masculine faces but this finding doesn’t reliably replicate.
I would dismiss this as confusing noise and say that men like feminine faces. The one exception is that men seem to prefer slightly thicker eyebrows on women, despite the fact that thick eyebrows are technically more masculine.
So what traits make a feminine face?
More feminine faces have bigger eyes, fuller lips, a shorter lower face, higher cheekbones and more prominent cheekbones (rather than child-like chubby cheeks), a narrower nose, thinner eyebrows, arched eyebrows, a less pronounced brow ridge, smoother skin, more contrast between features, and a narrower jaw.
Combined, a more feminine vs less feminine face.
I expected neoteny to be harder to research because I thought men might lie, lest they get accused of pedophilia, but across cultures men are pretty honest about their preference for more neotenous features.
There’s a lot of overlap between feminine and neotenous features – big eyes, small noses, smooth skin – but they aren’t exactly the same. Children lack the cheekbones and full lips of a woman in her full bloom. So when there’s tension between femininity and neoteny, what do men choose?
Three quarters of my twitter followers thought the feminine face was more attractive than the neotenous face. I also asked a bunch of my friends and they said things like ‘The first is a borderline movie star. The second is the most attractive woman in a small town in Bosnia in 1992’. And ‘the one on the left is older and more haggard looking, but I chose her anyway’.
Aella ran a survey trying to work out what age women hit the wall at. She used images of real and AI generated attractive brunettes who looked like (based on other polls) different ages. I was surprised to see that the faces men were keenest to date or have casual sex with were 27, 28, and 29.
These faces were more popular than other, very pretty, but more neotenous faces from her sample.
Let’s split the question of femininity vs neoteny into its two components. First, do men prefer faces with fuller lips? Second, do men prefer prominent cheekbones or neoteny?
Femininity vs neoteny (Is lip filler worth it?)
There are lots of tiny studies with noisy information about men’s lip preferences but they are inconclusive.
We are left with our common sense. If we look at pictures of famously beautiful women we see that they have lips that are about as full as they can get while still looking natural.
Because I think it is important to get a feel for the shape of the distribution, we must investigate whether there is a substantial portion of men who like faces that are so young that adult actresses can’t fulfill that look. Let’s call it a supernormal stimulus of sorts.
AI and anime girls indicate that, when realism isn’t important, the faces start to look suspiciously young. I went on a platform for AI generated art, and looked at the most popular images for this month. Here are some of the top images with the womanly bodies cropped out.
When you crop out the bodies, they all look like children. They have large eyes, delicate chins, and their noses and mouths barely exist. Anime girls usually have eyes about two to three times regular human eyes, and girl characters even have pupils about twice the size of male characters.
But perhaps the art style is confusing things. These are the top images from a model that does ‘realistic’ images.
They all look quite young and the eyes are implausibly large, but the lips are full enough to imply to me that they have, at least, gone through puberty. I would guess that these are the faces of teenagers and not children.
Femininity vs Neoteny (Buccal fat and its removal)
A recent bit of internet discourse has centered around buccal fat removal. The kinds of people who try to avoid pasteurised milk suspect there is a conspiracy going on in Hollywood whereby otherwise beautiful actresses are having their buccal fat removed as part of a general plot to make men miserable.
What’s happening is levels of face fat – buccal fat included – are trapped between competing signals of attractiveness. On the one hand, high levels of buccal fat will make your face look younger. On the other, it makes you look fatter and reduces the prominence of your cheekbones.
People are pretty good at identifying small changes in weight from faces.
Extra weight doesn’t just increase the width and reduce the angularity of your face. It also makes the eyes and lips look smaller, lowers the eyebrows, and makes the complexion redder and brighter. Studies generally find that men prefer faces at the lower end of the healthy BMI range but the sample sizes aren’t very large and they don’t measure underweight or obese people.
There are lots of good reasons to be slim. In comparison to other data, this is a relatively weak signal but it points you in the same direction as everything else.
Unsurprisingly, as feminine faces seem to beat neotenous faces, men report having a preference for higher and more prominent cheekbones. But, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not a very strong preference. There are also a handful of small studies that suggest that buccal fat removal makes younger women more attractive in the short term but that they will look worse when they are in their forties.
I wouldn’t trust such small studies. So let’s go back to our common sense and look at more famously beautiful women.
I would say that here, only Adriana Lima has particularly prominent cheekbones. The other three women have their buccal fat totally intact. However, it takes years to build enough fame to make it onto a list of famous women. So these actresses are often much older than their peak attractiveness (there are more women in their forties than their twenties on that list). As the question of buccal fat is tied to youth, we should look at more age-appropriate libraries of beautiful women to answer the question.
What about top OnlyFans girls?
The OnlyFans girls seem to have a similar mix of cheek bone prominence as the celebrities. So do AI girls.
Beautiful actresses, OnlyFans models and AI girls all have levels of face fat that you would expect a woman with a healthy BMI to have and, after that, they have varying levels of cheekbone prominence. I suspect some individual men will have a strong personal preference, but there’s no particular bone-to-fat ratio that is the clear winner.
What can we conclude about femininity and neoteny from this? I think it is clear that neoteny and femininity are both very important to men and all women renowned for their looks will have both. However, when they are in competition, most men will break for femininity.
I think the distribution of men’s preferences are something like this
Doesn’t literally everyone have beautiful eyes?
Describing someone as having beautiful eyes often seems to me like saying they have ‘a nice personality’. Basically everyone has good enough nice eyes and a passable personality, but people are willing to dole out the compliment far too easily.
First, as a clear sign of youth and femininity, big eyes are a clear win. But there are other popular features beyond that.
Generally we like eyes that tilt up on the outside corners, called positive canthal tilt. I think this is the reason winged eyeliner is popular as it can give the illusion of an appealingly cat-like canthal tilt.
We also generally like eyes where the pupils are far apart.
Men usually look better with wide and flat eyes, but some women can look good with round.
I had some intuition that we mostly find coloured eyes – blues and greens – prettier than brown. There are some studies by contact lens companies that say people prefer blue eyes and there are some confused studies that say that people have Freudian preference for the eye colour of their opposite-sex parent. Others find that blue-eyed men specifically prefer blue-eyed women because it makes paternity easier to verify. None of that evidence is particularly persuasive.
If we consult our libraries of attractive celebrities, we find a rainbow of eye colours.
Half of these women have light eyes and half have brown eyes. That’s roughly representative of the American population.
Generally, eye colour is not very important. My theory is that, insofar as it is important, the hue isn’t relevant but there is a small boost from having light eyes, provided you have a strong limbal ring. Your limbal ring is the dark ring around your iris. Small children will sometimes have stunningly thick and dark rings around their irises and then they weaken with age. Like many things that start in youth and fade with the sands of time, we generally find eyes with prominent limbal rings to be more attractive.
What does the most beautiful woman look like?
Faces can vary in so many ways that I think no two people will agree on what the most beautiful face looks like. That being said, there are broad trends in what men like and I think a face like this will be the most universally popular.
She’s a feminine, neotenous Wasian.
But I think this face, having overshot some of the typical male preferences, would have more suitors who were really obsessed with her.
Men don’t even know what they like about hair
If you ask men what kind of hair they like, they will probably say they like blondes or some nonsense. They might, if pushed, say that they prefer long hair. I think this is a key way in which men are particularly boneheaded about their own preferences. What is very clear, from an outsider perspective, is that basically all women who are known for being attractive have very thick, very healthy, shiny, and heavy-looking hair.
From time to time, they might mix it up but, by default, attractive celebrities wear their hair in thick, glossy waves.
In fact, their waves are so thick and healthy looking, despite all the heat treatment and colour changes they go through, that I’m tempted to say most famous women are wearing wigs or hair extensions.
Sexy AI girls all have very nice hair too.
Having nice and feminine hair can give a very significant attractiveness boost to an otherwise plain woman. After losing weight, maintaining hair health is the most important thing a woman can do for her looks.
Do blondes really have more fun?
Okay, now I’ve trashed men’s taste for blondes as being overrated. I’m going to walk it back a bit. Blonde women are overrepresented on the cover of women’s magazines. They are even more overrepresented in Playboy centerfolds, porn, sex dolls, and AI sexy ladies. Blonde sex workers earn more. Blonde women in general earn more too and so do their husbands.
The question about why blonde hair arose is a fraught debate. The genes for red hair also lighten skin, so red hair confers a clear advantage in sunless Ireland. But some of the mutations for blonde hair affect hair colour alone, implying that something else, perhaps sexual selection, led to its rise in Europe. The theory goes that the Ice Age meant that men had to hunt scarcer and large game across further distances so they died at much higher rates. Because of food scarcity, this male shortage didn’t become polygyny. Instead, European women underwent a period of extreme sexual selection while men underwent a period of hunting-related selection and this period of selection is why, they say, people whose ancestors spent time on the frozen tundra have interesting hair and eye colours.
It’s a neat story but I think it needs a little more empirical evidence to be true. For example, blue eyes precede blonde hair by thousands of years which is why Cheddar man, the oldest skeleton found in Britain, is thought to look like this.
What I find compelling about this theory is that I think men like variety and they do seem keen on unnatural hair colours in the right context.
But that doesn’t mean that blonde hair is definitely more attractive to the median man. While blondes – at 20ish% of the white population – are overrepresented in the sexy-lady sectors, brunettes are still a majority. Presumably, if blonde hair was strictly more attractive to everyone, then all Playboy centerfolds and sex dolls would be blonde. I don’t expect the adult entertainment industry to have egalitarian compunctions about this sort of thing.
I think blonde hair, like buccal fat, is stuck between competing signals of attractiveness.
The case for the prosecution is that first, men like youth and hair darkens with age, so all things being equal you should expect men to prefer blonde hair. Second, by virtue of being rare, blonde hair will appeal to some men’s taste for variety.
But it’s not all upside. The case for the defence is that contrast is a sign of femininity. For most skin tones, dark hair, dark eyelashes, and dark eyebrows will stand out more. Sanilac also observed that all the most popular faces in his sample are framed by dark hair.
There’s culture to consider as well. We’ve had many years of dumb blonde jokes. People will make assumptions about your character based on your hair colour. Is going blonde, for some men, a social equivalent of wearing a low cut leopard print dress to the JP Morgan summer party? I think, alas, some men are sufficiently disconnected from their libido to view fake blonde hair as a sign of tackiness and promiscuity rather than a charming attempt to appeal to the male gaze. There was one study that found that men rated a picture of a woman as more attractive when she was brunette but they were more likely to approach her in a nightclub when she was blonde. Maybe they thought the blonde woman was less attractive but easy. Or maybe they really did think she was more attractive when blonde but felt it would seem tacky to say so.
My personal opinion is that high contrast is one of the most important elements of facial beauty. I think this is why, despite being masculine, thick eyebrows are appealing. So I think the most beautiful woman in the world will have relatively light skin and dark hair (see my Wasian AI girl from earlier). But overall attractiveness isn’t determined by a pretty face alone. A lot of facial flaws can be overlooked by a good figure and nice hair. So for most white women, if their hair is healthy enough to withstand some bleach or highlights, then they will be better off with light hair.
Should you go ginger?
Red hair is another complicated question. The academic evidence is basically nonexistent.
About 5% of porn stars are red haired. I went on an AI porn site (Promptchan) and gathered stats on the top images. I found that of the 41 animations I looked at, 6 had red hair (14%).
Considering only about 3-ish% of the white American population is red-haired, this is incredible over representation.
I also polled people on whether they preferred Taylor Swift with blonde, red, brunette, or black hair.
Blonde clearly won the poll and red came in second. But, when I asked my friends to rank their preference (rather than just vote for their favourite), most put the red-headed Taylor Swift last.
I’m guessing that there is a small and underserved population of red-hair lovers but the average man doesn’t really like red hair.
Body Hair
Most men say they prefer it when women remove their pubic hair, though there is a large minority of bush lovers.
For some reason, someone has investigated the incidence of pubic hair prevalence in free internet pornography depicting threesomes – we have to assume that the specificity was driven by the preferences of the researchers – and they found that pubic hair has been disappearing. In 2012 about half the actresses had pubic hair but by 2020 only a quarter did. This matches some other data. Younger men dislike pubic hair more. My brief foray into AI girl image generation sites showed no images of women with a full bush and I assume their users skew young.
My guess is this is a newish cultural preference that is sweeping the West and things could always change back but for now getting rid of pubic hair is safest.
I get the impression that older men are mildly wistful of a time when women had hair on their nether regions while younger men experience disgust and contempt when faced with an unshaved vulva. My theory is that this is all about cunnilingus. Older men don’t do that sort of thing and so they are just thinking about aesthetics. Younger men, on the other hand, complain about the smell, friction, and unseemly fluids that get trapped in pubic hair.
It’s easier to just get rid of it.
So now we’re thinking about hair, here is my update to the most attractive possible person. She would probably still have the same face, but she needs thicker and longer hair.
But, because of the blonde and red-haired premium, and some overshooting of other typical facial preferences, I think these women would have more suitors.
Here are some beautiful AI girls from around the world. I don’t know what prompts the creators to make them, but they share a lot with my ChatGPT girls. All these faces point to the same ground truths about what makes an appealing face.
Reclaiming ‘curvy’
The euphemism treadmill has come for the word curvy but I shan’t relinquish it. It’s too useful. When I search for curvy models on Pinterest, I get images of plus size models who, yes, generally have generous hips and thighs but they also carry far more adiposity on the waist and stomach than most consider to be sexy. Not to be uncouth but we already had a perfectly good word for that body type: fat.
Using the word curvy – which should refer to the sexiest women – as a euphemism for fat doesn’t change the fact that being fat is bad for your health, sexiness, and social standing. But it does degrade my ability to describe a useful concept. So it’s basically all downside.
I am reclaiming curvy. When I use the word here I am talking about bodies that have small waists and have one, or several of, wide hips, thick thighs, large breasts, and a generous round bum. In terms of traditional body shapes, a pear, triangle, and hourglass are all curvy. An apple and a rectangle are not.
These women are all curvy on at least one of the important dimensions.
These women are all not curvy, at different weights and muscle tones.
Me vs Cartoons Hate Her (Thinness vs curvyness)
In my first post my advice was that most women should lose weight but not too much weight. As different women wear their fat in different places, a good rule of thumb is rather than aim for a specific BMI, find the weight at which you have the most extreme hourglass.
I’m a big fan of Cartoons Hate Her’s blog and she wrote a friendly response to me and an unfriendly response to Sanilac, I’m going to use her as a foil for the rest of the piece.
First, CHH polled people to work out what most people rated as the ideal body type. In general, I haven’t been taking line drawings and unrealistic renders as evidence. I think the images are often too weird This is the winning body from her poll, neither particularly skinny or particularly curvy.
And this, curvier body did worse.
Like with a lot of digital renders, this body looks weird. Now, I don’t want to be rude about people who have this body type, but the way the fat is distributed on this body is implausible and crosses over into uncanny. Despite having wide hips, this is quite a scrawny looking figure. All of the hip mass comes from having a wide set pelvis, steep love handles, and a little extra fat at the very top of the thighs. On a real woman with these measurements, there would be far more ass, hip and thigh fat. Something about the shape also means the waist doesn’t look that small.
Comparing the ‘closest she could get to Kim Kardashian’ to actual Kim Kardashian (well, insofar is Kim Kardashian’s body is still ‘actual Kim Kardashian’) you can see that the way the fat falls is an important part of a good waist to hip ratio.
Here are some other curvy human women.
The point is not that men find narrow-hipped slender women repulsive. Slender without curves is the second, maybe third, best body type. But it is possible to be too skinny.
There isn’t fantastic evidence about which BMIs people prefer. There are studies that use line drawings. Others use body fat x-rays which create horrible ghostly images like this.
But there are enough weak studies that together paint a rough picture. Men in the industrialised west prefer BMIs in the low-to-normal range and men in poorer countries prefer higher-but-still-healthy BMIs. In the English-speaking world, you can assume the ideal BMI is from about 17 to 20. A healthy BMI range is generally considered to be 18.5 to 25.
For reference these women are all 5ft 5 and have BMIs of 17, 20 and 25 respectively.
I think what’s going on here is that weight carries a lot of – pardon the pun – baggage with it. My guess is, in a Rousseauian state of nature, the average man’s preference would be for weights that only lie in the healthy range but, because thinner people are higher status, Western men are attracted to thinner bodies than they are naturally inclined.
We know that women are more attracted to men they perceive as higher status. As a society we have come to accept that liking the billionaire werewolf is part of a healthy female sexuality. But I think men also experience a milder version of this phenomenon and therefore they generally prefer thin women, partly, because they seem classier and more intelligent. Slimness also has the added effect of making women seem younger.
After a low BMI, men like small waists and big hips. People often ludicrously describe wide hips as ‘childbearing (complimentary)’. I assume it’s because the average person’s shape rotation skills are so deficient that they can’t work out where exactly the baby goes. Or maybe they have complicated evopsych theories about the impact of hip fat on the size of the birth canal. idk.
Regardless, Miss America winners and Playboy models all have low waist-to-hip ratios (meaning a small waist and wide hips). Men of all ages and education levels prefer a low waist-to-hip ratio and, depending on the study, the ideal waist-to-hip ratio is in the 0.6 to 0.7 range. (The average woman with a healthy weight has a waist-to-hip ratio of about 0.77.)
These women have waist to hip ratios of 0.57, 0.7, and 0.77 respectively.
And, because I promised I would address the ways in which some of these preferences aren’t universal, you’ll be pleased to find that the Hadza from Tanzania showed no preference for a low waist to hip ratio. Nor did forager horticulturalists in Ecuador. So if you’re more straight up-and-down perhaps you should look for a husband lower down the tech tree.
Beyond academic evidence, Sanilac looked at sex dolls sold by the four biggest retailers and found they had an average waist-top-bust and waist-to-hip ratio of about 0.61. Scaled to a normal woman that’s a 39 inch chest, 39 inch hips, and a 24 inch waist. Academic evidence corroborates this. A study, looking at sex dolls from SexyRealSexDolls.com also found that the sex dolls were curvy, with an average waist-to-hip ratio of 0.62.
I couldn’t find any good studies of anime girls, so I decided to check out the most popular anime girls on Ranker.
All of the hottest anime girls have remarkably similar bodies. When men like cartoons, it seems that they like them to have proportions that are within the realm of possible, but stretch plausibility almost as much as they stretch the blouses of their school uniforms.
All of them have breasts that are at least G cups and waist-to-hip ratios smaller than 0.6. Some real women do have proportions like that, but it is an exceptionally rare phenotype. This is, perhaps, a 1 in 100,000 body-type and is reliably popular – at least among weebs.
For a more realistic art style, here are some AI girls from Glambase.
They all have slightly more realistic versions of anime proportions. We’re talking 1 in 1000 bodies rather than 1 in a 100,000 but we see the same patterns; large breasts, small waists, big hips, a youthful face.
Now, the most pornographic images I won’t share here. But I’ll leave you to browse the top images on PromptChan if that’s your thing. Basically all of the women generated are slim with wide hips and large breasts. Many of them – even the photorealistic ones – have bodies even curvier than the anime girls. The breasts are sometimes comedically large and the faces can end up looking suspiciously young. The women are also weirdly shiny sometimes, like they’ve been covered in oil, so I guess that’s another reason to use your highlighter liberally.
The main thing I learned from my misadventure is that men really like the idea of anatomically implausible blowjobs. That’s between them and God.
Me vs Cartoons Hate Her (Breasts)
If you read this recommendation for an air fryer, wouldn’t you think it was the most milquetoast non-recommendation in the world.
If you’re seriously considering getting a new kitchen gadget, you’ll get the most out of an air fryer. It costs about the same as buying fancy flour. I’m not sure which will improve your baking the most.
Across popular kitchen gadgets, people report the highest long-term satisfaction with air fryers (followed by other heating-based implements like deep fat fryers and hot plates) and the lowest satisfaction with stand mixers. That makes sense if people largely prefer the same level of bakedness but lots of different levels of fluffiness.
I’m on the fence about recommending air fryers but it’s probably one of the places where someone really serious about improving their baking can get some alpha and outcompete the casuals. If you’re willing to go that far you shouldn’t be too squeamish to read Which.com. They have a lot of advice about how to choose the right air fryer for you.
I would like to emphasise four things before you go full steam ahead.
Don’t get an air fryer until you’ve perfected your ideal baking technique. What kind of air fryer you need will change depending on what you’re making. The meta study that finds that people are generally satisfied with air fryers also finds that people who haven’t perfected their technique are overall less satisfied with kitchen gadgets.
Don’t get a weak air fryer. Strong air fryers take up just as much counter space as cheap ones. I think people get weak air fryers because they think they can fool people into thinking they are still using the oven but most people, especially people interested in baked goods – i.e. your target market – will notice.
If you get an air fryer you risk fires, under baked food, salmonella, and problems with pleasing your dinner guest. The odds aren’t high but they’re not so low you can dismiss them. About 1 in 20 people with air fryers will have some kind of problem. Do your research and buy the right product. Do not cheap out.
Don’t do something that will make you resent the air fryer. If you spend the money and no longer have chopping space, will you blame it?
Does that read like someone telling you to buy an air fryer? If I had written these words about literally anything else you would say ‘Aria weighs up the pros and cons of getting a boob job’ not ‘Did you read Aria’s post recommending boob jobs’.
I had to reread what I’d written over and over again just to double check. Did I really recommend that women get boob jobs? Did I actually say that most men like implausibly large anime titties or just one wealthy one I happen to know? But, for the record, when I posted in a group chat about my discovery that men like large breasts, another of my multi-millionaire friends said ‘what, did you think we were lying?’
The narrative had gotten so far away from my actual opinions that I had to double check that I hadn’t written something I don’t endorse in the spirit of comedic exaggeration or something.
My actual opinion is that I think the average man likes large – roughly E cup – breasts. Anime titties are not the median man’s preference but, by overshooting the typical male preference, larger breasts will probably get you more suitors. However, for reasons outlined in the previous post, my position on boob jobs remains ‘I am on the fence’.
Personally, outside researching and writing these blog posts, I don’t think about breasts that much. I’m a straight woman, breasts aren’t one of my hobbies or interests. What this whole debacle has updated me in favour of is thinking that literally everyone else is totally obsessed with breasts. You can’t give a cautious recommendation for a boob job without it subsuming the rest of your body of work. No wonder Sydney Sweeney’s corset and push up bra caused such a ruckus.
Now, let’s dive into the data.
I couldn’t find a single academic paper that showed over 1,000 men pictures of realistic breasts and asked them what they liked.
Most of the papers you find on breast preference will say in the abstract ‘we found that hungry men prefer larger breasts’ and you’ll see that they tested 50 guys in a breakroom on pictures like this.
I understand that it’s a bit weird to look at more realistic images on a work computer, but what can I really glean about men’s breast preferences in the Czech Republic vs Cameroon from how a few dozen of their undergrads rank these pictures? I was very excited to learn about eye-tracking studies, but they use the same silly images as the other studies.
The best study asks men and women (boo) to rank their favourite breasts based on realistically pornographic digital renders of breasts. The breasts were all the same size (roughly E cups) but had different levels of perkiness. The most popular breast was a 45:55, meaning the nipple points up but not too much.
Another study asked about a thousand people (men and women again, ugh) to rank their favourite breasts, using before-pictures from a plastic surgeon. And they found that everyone, across all demographics, agreed that the most perky and symmetrical breasts were nicest. (Although the straight men were the most enthusiastic).
Eyeballing the breasts, all of which were considered defective enough to merit plastic surgery, it seemed you could get away with very small breasts if they were perky and you could get away with saggier breasts if they were large. I have a guess about how well large and perky breasts would be rated, but no one will independently verify my hypothesis for me.
All the other papers use small samples, weird images, and are mostly trying to measure differences between subsets (like hungry vs sated) without having enough people to generate statistically valid results.
Not to be conspiratorial, but academia has been even more of a let down than I thought it would be. I just feel like someone, at some point, should have shown men a bunch of actual photographs of real tits and worked out what people liked.
Fortunately, we’re not abandoned to our common sense. Aella is here to save the day. She assessed the pricing of escorts on the website Tryst. The average female escort prices her services at slightly over $500 per house. Hair and eye colour make a small difference to pricing (green eyes earns $528 per hour, blonde hair $533).
Body type had a more substantial impact on earnings. Slim and athletic escorts earned $550. Initially, it looked like breast size didn’t have much of an impact on earnings. But, if you look at the breast size of just slim escorts, it had a very substantial impact. A slim escort with A cups earned about $525 but a slim escort with E/FF cups earned a crazy $670.
If you’re about to say ‘what men want in sex workers bears no resemblance to what they want in wives’, Aella has another interesting tidbit about what punters are looking for. The escorts who earned the most had profiles that used words like ‘life’, ‘adventure’, and ‘experiences’. While the words ‘service’, ‘fun’, and ‘hey’ were all associated with lower prices. So even when sourcing an escort, men prefer signs of class and intellect.
Similarly, a German study on escort pricing finds that about 60% of the price was determined by looks (age, weight, breast size etc) and 40% by ‘education and communication’ skills (whether they had a degree, could speak another language, had intellectual interests).
To conclude Aella says
‘If we combine all of these, our highest priced escort is a 5’9”, thin, green-eyed blonde in her 20’s, who uses classy language, lives in New York, and has really fat titties.’
Except for the part about living in New York – which may be a terminal malady – she’d do very well on the marriage market too.
Aella also asked a bunch of people to rate pictures of naked bodies. She writes about her findings here but mostly discusses how people’s self reported hotness contrasts with their actual hotness. Fortunately for my purposes, her raw data is available for anyone to peruse.
I asked Claude to go through the images and estimate BMI, waist-to-hip ratio, and breast size. Claude refused. So I asked ChatGPT to do the same and it not only made me a handy spreadsheet but proactively rated how reliable it thought the estimates were, adjusted the correlations accordingly, and told me which factors had the strongest effect on ratings.
The results are all roughly what you would expect. BMIs of roughly 19/20 had the best ratings (performing better than slightly underweight). The lower the waist-to-hip ratio, the better the rating. And, after adjusting for BMI and perkiness, larger breasts got better ratings up to an E cup, after which greater size didn’t get better ratings.
The overall conclusion is that waist-to-hip ratio has the strongest impact on ratings, followed by BMI, followed by breast size. Apparently perkiness and photograph quality did correlate with attractiveness but the effect disappeared after controlling for the three main factors.
I would guess the reason photo quality seems to correlate with genuine attractiveness is because Aella’s sample contains quite a few women who have made the profession publicising nice pictures of their naked bodies on the internet. The top rated body certainly belongs to a purveyor of sexy pics. As those women are more likely to have nicer bodies, the top third of pictures contain a lot more professional-quality photographs than the bottom third, who probably aren’t practiced nude-takers.
In Sanilac’s sex doll survey, he finds that most have breasts that would be considered large on a real woman. The corroborating study found that the median sex doll had breasts that were a D cup. Personally I think their data wasn’t granular enough because the rest of the sex dolls, 49%, were put in the E to O cup category.
The modal breast size is very plausibly an E cup.
I think the researchers who did this study are quite stupid or very politically motivated (or why not both) because they also calculated the BMI of the sex dolls using their actual weight. Considering they are made of lightweight and cleanable plastic rather than meat, this gave them all implausibly low BMIs. The sex dolls are slim but they’re not wasting away.
My actual opinion on breasts is that we are thinking about the problem all wrong. We tacitly assume that the spectrum of preferences goes from small breasts to large breasts. Really the important spectrum ranges from indifferent to very interested.
Most men care more about weight and waist-to-hip ratio than they care about breast size. But there are definitely some men who care far more about breasts than they do about faces or slenderness. In the real world, slenderness and breast size trade off against each other. But, in the world of surgical enhancement, AI girls, anime, and sex dolls where these trade offs don’t exist, you end up with a plethora of women who are pretty slim and also very curvy.
Me vs Cartoons Hate Her (Are rich men built different?)
CHH says
But Aria specifically mentions her tips are directed at women looking to snag upper middle class husbands. In fact, she directly refutes the idea that class has any bearing on your preference for exaggerated curves versus less curvaceous slender bodies, and says:
Some people think that rich men like flat chested, narrow hipped women and only poor men like curves. There isn’t a good reason to think this is true, just a handful of bad papers that people really wanted to believe in. I asked my richest friend. He is worth several million, seems to be an adequate husband and father, and prefers implausibly massive tits.
Why are people apparently so invested in believing this myth, per her accusation? Nobody knows. You’d think the various media cabals would have bigger fish to fry than spreading the insidious agenda that richer men don’t like breast implants.
This is purely speculative but it isn’t my first day on earth. I think there are a few reasons this myth propagates.
The Freakonomics effect. Lots of people like a believable fun fact and hardly anyone reads studies.
Most women aren’t that curvy. They have a decided interest in believing that men don’t like curves that much.
The concept of ‘curvy’ often gets mixed up with the word ‘fat’. Poorer people usually weigh more and so you see poor men with ‘thick curvy’ wives.
I think because people intuitively believe that curvy women are attractive (hence the ‘gooner proportions’ goat), I think everyone feels it’s a bit too crass and a bit too obvious if that’s your preference. It’s like having milk chocolate as your favourite food or Taylor Swift as your favourite artist. It takes a refined and classy palate to prefer a slender rectangle.
The debate is intermixed with racial politics. People are taking as given that rich and desirable men are white and, if they have any good sense, they prefer white women. I don’t know if white women are actually less curvy than black or latina women, but people certainly think so. And so, by insisting that elite men prefer a slimmer build, they are describing what they consider the natural order: right-thinking white men preferring white women. I even know someone who said that he thought white men who liked ‘big asses’ were deracinated and that northern European men had always preferred slender blonde girls who look sixteen.
Our eyeballs are so blitzed with images of attractive and curvy women that we think that a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7 is what we should all come to expect. When I say curvy, I very much am including women with 0.7 waist-to-hip ratios. But in a world of anime and BBLs, people are crazy enough to think that Marilyn Monroe isn’t hourglass enough.
The only place I have found an actual divide between what rich and poor men like is BMI. And even in that case, I think it’s a question of whether you’re exposed to the West at all, not a question of whether you’re earning $200k or $50k in America.
In the rich world, people generally prefer women with BMIs closer to 18 while in the developing world, people prefer BMIs closer to 25. After that, there is no particularly compelling evidence that rich and poor men have different preferences on waist-to-hip ratio or breast size to anyone else.
I’ve now told two anecdotes about multi-millionaires, but I also have a number of other wealthy men in my social circle who have said they like curves. Two different men (a successful director of a company and a published author) messaged me to say that they didn’t realise, until they had read Sanilac’s article, just how common their preferences are. You want people who work in tech? You want lawyers? You want writers? You want academics? You want start up founders? You want finance-bros? You want politicians? You want the scions of fortune? All manner of 1%-ers traipse through my house and gossip with me.
What I like about furnishing my data with real stories of real marriageable men, is that qualitative data gives you some sense of what people mean when they give certain answers to polls. After a hundred or so conversations (I’m very popular), I have a good intuitive grasp of what the shape and strength of preferences are. And it’s why I feel able to say that I think breast preference is largely a spectrum of indifference to keenness rather than a question of size per se.
CHH then describes what her rich followers’ preferences are, and they are exactly what I think the median man’s preferences roughly are. They prefer, in order, ‘fitness’, ‘slimness’, ‘hair’, ‘boobs/bum’, ‘nails’. That’s what I would have guessed (except I am confused at fitness and slimness being different categories) and that is why headline min-max advice is to lose weight and grow your hair long.
In her second post, which was mostly a response to Sanilac, she then says
But some pushback I got—which I’ve seen before—is that you can’t trust how men respond to surveys (including the many reputable ones done, which show a distinct difference in average ideals between men of different socioeconomic statuses) because even anonymously, wealthier men feel pressured to claim to like less extreme curves than they actually like.
There’s a lot hanging on these studies, so let’s see what they actually show.
The first link goes to a study with an impressive sample size and country distribution. And it asks men and women to rate their ideal body from this chart.
What do you notice about these images? First, the slimmer bodies have the most impressive waist-to-hip ratios. The results can’t tell us anything about class differences in preferences for slim vs curvy women, because the slimmer bodies have the most impressive curves. Second, they are stupid line drawings.
Next, if you read the paper you see that – for all that the abstract claims that there is some kind of difference – the mean preference in every region was between 3 and 4. There’s remarkably little difference in how those bodies are drawn.
The other thing you will find is that Scandinavia, Oceania, Western Europe and Eastern Europe have the highest mean preference (3.6-3.7) while East Asia, South America and Africa have the lowest mean preference (3.0-3.2). This doesn’t quite fit the ‘rich white men prefer slender androgynes’ that everyone seems to believe.
The paper also tells you nothing about socioeconomic variation within countries.
The second link then goes back to this paper again, just posted on Macquarie University rather than by Research Gate. They even have the exact same title and exact same abstract on both pages.
The third is a paper that tries to draw cross comparisons across two data sets. One testing 266 people of differing socioeconomic status in Malaysia about how much they like these images.
And the other was asking 124 different British university students (not split by socioeconomic background) how much they liked breasts and then compared preferences between boys who are hungry and not hungry.
I’m sure these studies are reputable in their fields but I don’t think sensible people find them convincing. I personally don’t think you can conclude anything like there is ‘a distinct difference in average ideals between men of different socioeconomic statuses’.
At best you could say ‘White men prefer women who are slightly heavier. Hungry men prefer larger breasts, which probably explains why poor Malaysian men like larger breasts too’. But, for anyone familiar with the way social scientists have been known to torture their data, I wouldn’t conclude anything from these studies.
I return to my original statement.
Some people think that rich men like flat chested, narrow hipped women and only poor men like curves. There isn’t a good reason to think this is true, just a handful of bad papers that people really wanted to believe in.
Honestly, I will change my mind if I get any good evidence. But all that happens is people send me the same papers over and over again. And frankly, I don’t think any of you have even read the abstracts. Let alone paused to wonder if the researchers are perhaps … um … exaggerating their findings.
She then says:
If you look at the wives of men working in finance in Manhattan, they will look different from the wives of professional athletes, and both of those groups of wives will look different from the wives of wealthy Mormon businessmen or the wives of tech entrepreneurs. This doesn’t mean any of these groups are “virtue signaling” and marrying women they don’t like for some stupid reason.
Now it could be true that Manhattan finance guys have different preferences to professional athletes. But even if they had identical preferences, we should expect their wives to look different because women in these cultures look different. People mostly date within their own age bracket and social class, partly because of natural homophilic tendencies and party because that’s who they run into.
Americans assortatively mate so strongly, that people are more likely to marry if they study the same subject. Even when you control for educational attainment, people from wealthy backgrounds are more likely to marry each other. And real life age gaps are so small that 63% of newlyweds are within one year of each other’s age.
Of course, elite men have more say over who they date. They can probably have someone who matches them in social class and who has a great body. But we’re still working with tradeoffs. Even Timothee Chalamet isn’t experiencing a world of unconstrained physical ideals.
He’s still choosing a whole person. So who he chooses will tell you something about his preferences but it’s probably not the whole story. The observation that elite men usually marry women from their social class says nothing about the variation in their natural, carnal preferences.
All about that bass
There’s not as much good evidence on bums but they are worth a mention.
This paper asked a thousand people (both genders again) to rate a series of pictures of bums. From the ‘posterior view’ they found that the most popular bums had a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.65 with the widest point at the fold at the bottom.
And people seemed to like it when the bulk of the mass looked like it was coming from hip fat rather than glutes.
From the side, the most popular bum had a waist-to-ass ratio of 0.7 with the widest point in the middle of the bum.
The paper breaks the sample down by race, but there was so little difference that I consider it to be statistical noise.
The best body problem
Combining this information together, it’s clear that men generally like women who are slender on the waist with wide hips, a round bum, and large breasts. It’s easy to come up with an explanation for this. Like with faces, men are looking for clear signals that the person they are looking at is a healthy, fertile, human woman. It is unattractive to give signals that you’re too weird to be human, too young or old to be fertile, too misshapen to be healthy, or too masculine to be a woman. But for some people, ‘too weird to be human’ could be triggered by a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.5 and for others that would be peak attractiveness.
Essentially you want to look feminine but the point at which extreme femininity seems perturbing will be different for different men.
I think this research points to the ideal woman being; slender with a BMI of about 18, a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.65ish, a round but not too perky bum, and E cup breasts. To get a sense of the distribution, especially how it applies to photorealistic women, I asked my friends to send me their favorite e-girls.
This was probably the slimmest model sent in. She’s so skinny her rib cage is more prominent than her breasts but despite that she’s clearly got wide hips – I think mostly because she’s got a good skeleton – and quite a large ass.
The heaviest model (nsfw) was clearly overweight but still quite hourglass shaped. What’s notable about this woman is that, because her breasts are so large, she can get away with them being quite saggy. I think it’s an honest signal that they’re real.
Considering how clear and basically universal the preference for a low waist-to-hip ratio is, I was surprised there were some girls who were quite straight up and down.
These were the models who mostly had very beautiful faces and a clear brand. Their vibe was more professional influencer than OnlyFans-peddler. They give off the vibe that they’re just normal girls who happen to have a popular Instagram and it’s not really for men at all. (Even though the preponderance of bikini pics reveals the lie.)
I don’t think their high waist-to-hip ratio is what drew men to them. Instead, I think the guys who like them have a stronger preference for a classy character and beautiful face than a small and well-defined waist. Take heart, even for e-girls, personality is an important part of the overall attractiveness package. Men and women aren’t so unalike after all! (Note, however, all of these women are quite thin. I think even at slightly higher body fat percentages, they couldn’t pull it off.)
Generally, however, the curviness levels were roughly what you would expect.
And for some, extend into the realm of supernormal stimulus.
Overall, there is some wiggle room around preferences. But that wiggle room isn’t uniform. Beautiful faces vary quite a lot but they are all young and feminine. Attractive influencers have every possible hair, eye and skin colour but they all have thick and healthy hair. Most manage to be both thin and curvy but you can get away with being fatter if you have excellent curves or you can get away with being curveless if you’re very thin. I don’t think any of the influencers I was sent had poor curves and a BMI of over 20.
So, combining this all together, this is the most beautiful possible woman.
But by exaggerating common preferences, a woman with a more extreme hourglass could have more suitors. But we’ll never know because ChatGPT considers even fully clothed versions of anime proportions to be pornographic. We have to wonder why …
I think this piece will make a lot of women sad and defensive. The last one certainly did. There are two things in this world that it is terrible to be: ugly and stupid. That’s why we have platitudes like ‘everyone is clever in their own way’ or ‘everyone is beautiful in their own way’. It would be comforting if it were true and in some ways I think I have broken some society-wide pact to maintain these untruths.
Just because I think there is such a thing as generally appealing and popular beauty, that doesn’t mean I think it’s right that looks are as important as they are. Ugly people, women especially, have life much harder than others. But that doesn’t mean that I think the men who prize looks are bad, unusual, or worth avoiding.
I think liking a beautiful woman is a bit like preferring salty or fatty food. It’s not universal and it’s not virtuous, but it’s part of the fabric of life. Giving in and eating all the fatty food you like isn’t in your best interest but you lack joie de vivre if you only eat an optimised diet of Huel and supplements. It’s okay for men to consider their lustful urges when selecting a partner and you shouldn’t think less of them for it.
Women have gained a lot by escaping their corsets, swapping their high heels for comfortable shoes, and letting themselves gain a few extra kilograms that they can hide in a loose fitting dress.
I think some people have managed to convince themselves that if they keep to genteel company – with the educated, the kind, and the rational – then they haven’t cost themselves anything by eschewing feminine effort. But I think they have actually just silenced the men around them and not actually rewired their desires.
Hopefully you take this in the way this is intended. More than I wish to impart any particular idea, I’m trying to impart an ethos here: with effort and strategy you can improve your lot in life.
As a woman, improving your looks is a totally tractable problem. You can be at least a 5/10 if you focus on being slim, taking care of your hair and skin, and straightening your teeth. Most deformities are fixable. And even if you have one or two unfixable traits, you might be able to balance that out by getting a really perfect body (this is where a boob job could come in handy). If you also have a good degree or a cool job, can hold an interesting conversation, and generally act like a nice, sweet-tempered person, you should be able to marry well.
And, even if you think you’re a totally hopeless cause, don’t feel too demoralised. Ugly women get married every day, perhaps not to handsome or rich men, but to people who love them. And that’s really the most important thing.
The arbitrary zero on the x-axis is weighted towards the average man rather than the average woman. Cool.
Edit: I rescanned to check and it wasn’t so obvious. Maybe just every time it is as above it really jumps out at me. Interesting nonetheless. My preference is if it was centred on the average woman consistently.