She cautions against "reductive biological accounts", arguing that when science excludes the impact of social history, it can have damaging social impacts. She says these influences undermine the notion of a purely scientific explanation for what humans find beautiful. "You see very early on this relationship between capitalism, imperialism, racism and sexism that is going on in this globalisation of beauty," she says. That has partly been shaped by economic imperatives - such as attempts to create uniformity in beauty markets, so the same products can be sold everywhere.ĭr McCann says when celebrity product endorsements kicked off in the 1950s, "white, Hollywood stars" were used to sell products around the world, "rather than local women or local celebrities".
"What does the social world say is an attractive face?" "When we're being asked by a scientist, 'is this an attractive face?', that is part of a broader conversation of, what does culture say?" she says. To understand what we classify as beauty, she says, we need to look deep into the past, and consider the ideas that have been presented to us. Gender studies lecturer Dr Hannah McCann argues that ideas of beauty are inextricably linked to history. Step outside this field, however, and disagreement emerges. "There's no disagreement in my field about the strong evolutionary basis of beauty and preferences for certain attributes in faces." That's the evolutionary advantage," Dr Zietsch says. "That means their children will be healthier and have more offspring themselves. That means it's "evolutionarily advantageous" to pick a partner who is "stereotypically attractive". "The idea is basically that physical attractiveness reflects some sort of underlying quality, probably a genetic quality," he explains. So how does evolutionary science explain this universality? "A lot of the Western notions of beauty are universal," he says.
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