Essay Example on What makes people attractive

However people who are relatively young with smooth skin well proportioned bodies and regular features have consistently been acknowledged as the most attractive throughout history But in the 18th century these mathematical researches relating to beauty started to cease when philosophers like Edmund Burke and David Hume stated that beauty was subjectively defined For Hume beauty was no quality in things themselves it exists merely in the mind that contemplates them and each mind perceives a different beauty The idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder that people have different ideas of beauty thus they are not able to agree on who is beautiful and who is not was for long a dominant view in much of philosophy and art Nonetheless psychologists have argued that there might be objectively defined criteria of attractiveness Theorists highlight the impact on judgement of beauty of social and cultural norms and emphasize the idea that social stereotypes like the attractiveness is good bias create their own reality Another idea that is actually really popular in scientific circles is that beauty Is a reliable indicator of fertility and health MALE PERCEPTION These is a long list with several factors that play a role on what men desire on women but there is one thing they all have in common they are an index of health and youth Men like smooth skin long shiny hair and small waists 

Unconsciously men seek healthy and reproductively fertile In fact Kurzban and Weeden 2005 found the agreed upon mate values for both sexes were related almost entirely due to observable physical attributes like age facial features height and not those less observable characteristics like religious views education and their ideas about children WOMEN PERCEPTION Men are seen as less aesthetically pleasing than women as shown by a study using female and male raters of pictures Barber N 1995 This suggests men s physical attractiveness wasn t considered as a very important factor as it was for women during our evolutionary past Even though physical appeal is not that critical women still show a tendency to reject short men baldness along with others Women find physical attractiveness more essential during the first stages of dating but then focus on other characteristics as intelligence generosity and most importantly power and social status Most women do not seek for unemployed drunk or financially unstable men They are attracted to men to signs of high social positions like eating at classy restaurants and driving fancy cars Hitsch G Hortacsu A Ariely D 2010 Possibly that is the reason why men still pay the bills on dates The evolutionary explanation for this is that women are likely to find wealthy men as adequate to care for them and their offspring while she is pregnant and recovering