Do Women Prefer 'Manly' Faces?

What makes a face beautiful? What makes people seek out and desire to mate with the owners of beautiful faces? In recent years, scientists have turned to the theory of evolution to help us understand why some faces are judged to be more attractive than others.

According to the evolutionary view, the attractiveness of individuals is directly linked to their value as mates. A "high-value" mate is someone who best enhances your reproductive success. Going back into the evolutionary past of the human race, someone who noticed the cues to the value of a potential partner, and intentionally selected a high-value mate, would leave behind more children. These children would tend to inherit genes for attentiveness.

Attention to attractiveness is thus part of our evolutionary design.

This scientific analysis is reflected in the fact that our magazines and television screens are filled with attractive people. It's obvious that both women and men are highly concerned with good looks in a partner.

The same is true across the animal kingdom. A diverse range of species relies on external factors to attract mates, such as the size, shape, and colour of their feathers, fur and antlers. Why has evolution accentuated these particular characteristics? A variety of mechanisms may be responsible. The most obvious is that attractiveness is associated with the quality of an individual's genes.

The testosterone link

One link between "good genes" and attraction could be the masculine face-shape.

We can all spot the difference between the faces of grown men and women, and researchers have identified the reasons why. Boys and girls have similar face shapes. At puberty, hormones act on their faces to masculinise or feminise them and produce distinctive features of mature men and women. Testosterone provokes the growth of certain facial features - such as the jaw and cheekbones - so boys' faces grow more than girls'. Female faces remain relatively childlike. High levels of oestrogen in growing girls prevents the growth of facial bone, and leads to increased thickness of lips and fat deposition in the cheek area.

Theoretically, men with more 'masculine' faces should be more attractive, because there are evolutionary costs involved in developing such characteristics. The reason comes back to the testosterone levels associated with the very male face-shape. Testosterone decreases the effectiveness of the body's immune system, and so only healthy individuals with high quality immune systems can afford to produce the hormones required to produce masculine characteristics.