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Link to original content: http://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39367176/
Curviness is a better predictor of a woman's body attractiveness than the waist-to-hip ratio - PubMed Skip to main page content
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. 2024 Oct 4;14(1):23081.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-74265-z.

Curviness is a better predictor of a woman's body attractiveness than the waist-to-hip ratio

Ronald Hübner  1 , Emily Sophie Ufken  2
Affiliations

Curviness is a better predictor of a woman's body attractiveness than the waist-to-hip ratio

Ronald Hübner et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

The waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) is commonly used as an indicator of mid-body fat distribution and is often used to answer health-related questions. It has also been suggested that a woman's WHR can signal her reproductive fitness. This notion is supported by evidence indicating a relation between WHR and a woman's physical attractiveness. However, it was also acknowledged that the actual fitness cue is the curviness of a woman's body. While curviness is easy to perceive, it is difficult to quantify. Therefore, the WHR is often considered as a simple measure of body curviness. However, the WHR and curviness are not uniquely related. After replicating results of a pioneering study in this area, we therefore tested whether the WHR or curviness better predicts a woman's physical attractiveness. As stimuli, we used simple line drawings of women's bodies, differing in their curviness and width. The results demonstrate that curviness is a better predictor, even though we used a relatively simple curvature-based measure of curviness. This outcome indicates that the WHR is a poor measure of a woman's body curviness and underscores the need for a more accurate measure of curviness when assessing the physical attractiveness of a woman's body.

Keywords: Curvature; Curviness; Physical attractiveness; Waist-to-hip ratio.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Traced line drawings of female bodies from Singh. The bodies are from the normal weight category (N). Bodies from the WHR category 8, 9, and 10 are superposed with body N7, respectively, to demonstrate how the WHR was varied (see text for details).
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Examples of Singh’s line drawings. In the center column are the normal weight stimuli with a WHR of 0.7 (N7) and 0.9 (N9), respectively. Left and right are the corresponding underweight and overweight stimuli in red. For comparison, the stimuli are drawn on top of N7 and N9 bodies, respectively (U: underweight, N: normal weight, O: overweight).
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Results of Experiment 1. The average attractiveness ratings are provided as numbers at the top of each panel and are also coded by the background color. The heatmap goes from blue (48) to red (74).
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
The 25 body stimuli used in Experiment 2, with the number at the bottom indicating the respective WHR. Bodies with a dashed frame have a WHR that is closest to 0.7 for the corresponding width.
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
The five left-sided (viewer perspective) body contour lines and their curvature ‘comb’. The curvature along the lines is indicated not only by the (scaled) length of the comb teeth, but also by their color according to a heat map.
Fig. 6
Fig. 6
Results of Experiment 2. The mean attractiveness ratings are provided as numbers at the top of each panel and are also coded by the background color. The heatmap goes from blue (17) to red (69). The number at the bottom of each panel indicates the corresponding WHR.
Fig. 7
Fig. 7
The graphs in the two panels show the mean attractiveness ratings for each body width as a function of the WHR. The red symbols in the upper and lower panel represent the predictions by the WHR and the curviness model, respectively. For more details see the text.
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