Beauty: The Public Rating and the Private Taste

Ugliness has one advantage over beauty: it doesn’t fade with time.

— Serge Gainsbourg

In 1878 Francis Galton set out to obtain the face of a criminal. He took photographs of convicts, superimposed them on a single plate and hoped that a type would emerge out of the many separate faces — a visible imprint of criminality on the cheekbones, the eyes and the line of the mouth. The plan was very much in the spirit of the nineteenth century, which measured skulls with the confidence of a good land surveyor and hoped to find morality in bones. The experiment let its own idea down. The averaged faces looked not coarser and more dangerous than the originals but softer, more symmetrical and, awkwardly for the theory, more attractive. Superimposition removed scars, sharp asymmetries and random peculiarities; what remained was a familiar average face.

Galton was looking for the physiognomy of vice and stumbled onto one of the properties of beauty. Averageness and symmetry really can raise attractiveness, because they remove rare deviations and make a face easier to process. But it is easy to draw too broad a conclusion from that finding: that there exists a single scale on which everyone can be lined up from zero to ten, and that private taste is merely noise around the correct rating. Real judgements are built in a more complicated way. Looking at a class photo, a class will quickly agree on who counted as good-looking; twenty years later the same people will tell you they fell in love off a completely different list. Both memories can be accurate.

The agreement that cannot be waved away

The shared component of beauty exists. In many samples, observers within one culture and across cultures agree in their ratings markedly more than chance would give; averageness, symmetry, age cues and familiar standards create a common background. It shapes first impressions: attractive people are more often credited with desirable qualities and more readily given a chance. But the meta-analytic picture quickly loses its Hollywood tidiness. The “beautiful is good” stereotype is stronger for general social desirability and other people’s expectations, and weaker for intelligence, honesty and the actual quality of relationships.

The line “beauty is entirely subjective” describes the distribution of attention poorly. Some people really do get the first glance, the invitation or the reply more often. But an objective ten-point scale does not survive scrutiny either, because agreement explains only part of attractiveness. When the shared component is statistically separated from the individual one, a substantial share of private taste remains: one observer sees attractiveness where another does not notice it. After a few meetings the unique component grows stronger. The general external rating recedes, and the experience of a particular pair — voice, movement, smell, the way of listening, shared jokes and associations — carries more and more weight.

The language of ratings marks this as an error: “objectively he isn’t handsome, but…” The real story of attraction usually begins after that “but”. The causes of private taste need not be mystical. A photograph separates the face from the person and freezes it in a fraction of a second; a meeting returns appearance to a body, to time and to context. General and individual attractiveness turn out to be different measures. The first is useful to a modelling agency and to an app that has to decide what the eye will linger on. The second matters more where two people intend to spend not three seconds together but years.

The universal waist that moved to the Amazon

One decimal fraction looked for a long time almost like a formula for beauty. In early experiments with line drawings, a waist-to-hip ratio of about 0.7 was often rated attractive; the number was linked to health and fertility and promptly declared universal. It later turned out that the answer changes along with the design of the image: how independently body mass and shape are varied, who is doing the rating and in which culture. In a number of studies body mass index explained the ratings better than the ratio itself, and when the features varied together, the effect of the whole body was credited to a single number.

Outside Western samples the exact formula fell apart further still. Among the Matsigenka of the Peruvian Amazon the ratings differed, and greater contact with the dominant culture came with a shift in preferences. The data support a more modest biological conclusion: people are sensitive to age, build and bodily condition, but read them through the local environment. Plumpness could mean access to food, pallor exemption from work in the sun, a tan leisure and travel. The physiology of skin and fat tissue changed slowly; the information society extracted from them changed fast.

The average face and the memorable face

Raising your average rating solves the problem of the mass first impression. That is useful when the entrance is the bottleneck: a profile gets no replies, appearance puts people off before any conversation, the chosen environment reads clothing as a signal of carelessness or an incompatible way of life. But maximising the average rating leads to standardisation. The image becomes acceptable to many and particularly meaningful to almost no one. In a relationship both the level of general attractiveness and the distinguishing feature by which the right person can recognise you matter.

In a task that requires one mutual connection, a narrow strong match is often worth more than broad moderate approval. A pronounced peculiarity can put off the majority and become the main signal for a minority. Being well kept and legible reduces needless friction; individuality helps the right person notice specifically you. A universal standard sometimes improves the average rating at the cost of weakening the private signal.

Beauty has a public rating, but no final price of a person comes out of it. At the entrance the average face has the advantage. Acquaintance gradually adds weight to voice, movement, smell, habits and the history that arose between these particular people. Galton erased individual differences in order to see an essence. Love often runs the other way: it gradually picks one face out of the general human one.

Key sources

Galton, F. (1878). Composite portraits, made by combining those of many different persons into a single resultant figure. Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 8, 132–144.

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