Why 'quirky' people are attractive

Why 'quirky' people are attractive Michal Bialozej Having an unusual appearance that stands out from those around you could be an advantage when it comes to attracting a partner There are some universal standards of beauty, so why has evolution not made us all beautiful? Alamy The contorted pose depicted by Ingres in La Grande Odalisque could have been an attempt to exaggerate his model's attractive figure shape "We thought at one point that several, are linked to sex hormones, but now we realise that we have less evidence that that is the case," says Jeanne Bovet, an evolutionary biologist at Northumbria University in the UK. Bovet says that this preference arose simply because wider hips and a narrow waist communicate that a woman is of reproductive age, but not old, and that she has given birth a fewer number of times "One thing that seems to really hold is that traits that are attractive in women are often cues of age and also parity," says Bovet. Traits that are attractive in women are often cues of age – Jeanne Bovet If these attractive qualities are not always linked to women's genes, then sexually selective pressures might not apply, meaning there wouldn't be a reason for an hourglass figure to become the most common body type. Claw length is the key trait that matters to a female fiddler crab, so it's a bit like men only looking for a certain waist-to-hip ratio, or women focusing only on height.