so...you are against Free will then? or too much empehsis?

First of all, I must point out that beauty is an objective standard. It has to do with symmetry, etc.

Nevertheless...

People are comfortable/attracted to what they're used to -- what they see all the time.

I grew up with 2 sisters who didn't use makeup/earrings, and had long, straight dark brown hair. My mom used minimal makeup, and had straight brown hair. Guess what my wife looks like? Doesn't use makeup/earrings and has long, straight dark brown hair. It's what I'm comfortable around and therefore find "attractive". Even before I met my wife, I was always attracted to natural beauty and didn't care for the "fakeness" of makeup. I just didn't feel "at home" around women who wore lots of makeup.

Furthermore, my wife is of primarily German heritage. That's also true of my mother's side of my family. So I also found someone of my own race attractive. That, too, is very normal and not something to be ashamed of.

Of course, if you're looking for a superficial relationship (pleasure, hobbies/activities in common, etc.) then it's easy to "go outside what you're used to" -- but if you're looking for a REAL match, a soulmate, you need to find someone who has something in common.

Things like attitude toward money are important. My wife AND myself both grew up in lower-middle-class families, where we didn't have a lot of luxuries. So we're both frugal now. If she was used to being rich, and having lots of comforts, there would be tension between us.

So it's good to look for someone from a similar economic background as well.

Matthew

  By the last statement I meant that our free will is perhaps affected by what we hear from others. Because we are told that a fat mustached beared woman is ugly, we see them ugly, while that king who surely had many other options, chose them!

The lady has a little moustache problem?  :detective:

Those women look like Frida Kahlo, the Mexican artist!

Thank you for a good chuckle. I think you are taking the question of freedom of choice a little too narrowly, but it is always interesting to think about our standards of beauty.

Modern standards are really quite ugly. Starved bodies are being pushed by a misogynist fashion world dominated by ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖs, who of course hate us women in a way no heterosɛҳuąƖ male can afford to.

As an artist, I often sketch and paint all kinds of bodies in life-drawing classes. There is an inner beauty that comes through each one that cannot be denied, and has nothing to do with conventional beauty.

Baby study suggests beauty is not in the eye of the beholder

Babies come into the world with a genetic predisposition to favouring pretty faces rather than ugly ones, according to a new study.

The five-year programme at Exeter University was the first to examine newborn infants' reactions to a series of 30 photographs of female faces.

Dr Alan Slater, a psychology lecturer in child infancy who led the research, said he was surprised by the findings.

"To my complete surprise there was a strong effect of attractive and unattractive photos on infants." he said.

"I didn't for one moment believe we'd get these kinds of results from newborns. I was convinced it was a learned process. Our research shows that perception of beauty is something genetic rather than socially constructed."

Slater and eight researchers showed photos of white female models and non-models to babies for up to five minutes.

They studied nearly 100 babies up to the age of three days and found a significant difference in the time babies looked at attractive and unattractive photographs.

"They would spend 60-65% of the time looking at the attractive face, " Slater said.

Slater's team also swapped the internal features - eyes, nose and mouth - of the attractive face with those of the unattractive face.

"The babies were more responsive to the internal features, " said Slater. "This means these features are what the infants used to determine the attractiveness of the face."

Researchers also turned some images upside down, and the babies spent more time looking at faces in the correct position. "This suggests that the baby comes into the world with an inborn, innate representation of the human face that is orientated in the correct position, " said Slater.

"It is important from an evolutionary point of view that the baby recognises that it is a face and is part of a human. It helps the baby to develop human relationships."

Slater's research team has interpreted the results of the study in a number of ways.

"The babies' behaviour could be down to a prototype formation, which is when you see lots of faces and form a prototype so you can recognise what a face looks like, " he said.

"Our understanding is that babies like to look at attractive faces because they most resembles the prototype they've got in their brains.

"Given that we've found this in newborn infants who haven't seen that many faces it suggests that they come into the world with an in- built representation of a face which happens to correspond to an attractive face."

Slater rejected the argument that perception of beauty is a learned process.

He said: "If the concept of beauty is an entirely learned characteristic then the public wouldn't consistently pick the same people as being attractive.

If it was learned, it would mean infants seizing on their mothers, whatever she looked like, would regard her as being attractive.

"This would lead some to regard people like Angelina Jolie as being less beautiful but that's not the case.

"You may love your mother to bits but you will recognise that she is not the most beautiful woman in the world."

Dr Gwyneth DohertySneddon, senior psychology lecturer at Stirling University in child development, said: "A fair bit of evolutionary psychology has been done which suggests visual perception is innate, but I think culture has a role to play too. There will be innate predisposition but that's not to say that that perception will continue throughout your life.

"I'd say most psychologists would like to think that there is an interplay between culture and what is inherent."

Slater said: "You could say that beauty is in the eye of beholder to some extent, but there is some kind of external standard against which we judge people to be beautiful.

This judgement appears to be part of a genetic inheritance."

I'd like to see more detail about what "attractive" meant to these studies.

In my own courses of Child Development in 1979-80 as a student, there was one that showed newborns responding to simple black circles inside white triangles and smily mouths as faces.

My assumption about "attractive" here is that the models would have smoother skin, more enhanced eyes, and also know how to look directly at the camera, all of which could enhance the infants' responses compared to wrinkled or frowning or otherwise confusing signals presented in the other photographs.

The same goes for the in-person experiment. How much more at-ease were the professionals compared with people who may have been misinformed about the purpose of the experiment? (a common part of this type of experiment, after all, is to mislead the participants so that they will not contaminate the results with their own intentions)

Babies definitely sense even the slightest tension in anyone who holds them. Aromas, too, might have played a role: was there any checking of perfumes among the models as compared with the other women?

Because you do have to be careful of the first steps of going down the eugenics highway.