// posted January 10, 2007 by Lou Schuler

In TC Luoma's Atomic Dog column on T-nation last week, he brought up this point about female beauty:

While it's often said that beauty is ever changing, skin-deep, and superficial, that line of thinking is largely bunk. Regardless of cultural preferences, two things remain timeless and irrefutable markers of beauty: facial symmetry and the mystical .7 waist-to-hip ratio, or WHR. If you haven't heard of the WHR before, Professor Devendra Singh of the University of Texas at Austin originated the concept in a paper he wrote in 1993.


Quite simply, the .7 WHR reflects the size of the waist to the size of the hips. Non-obese men, obviously, have a WHR closer to 1, while non-obese women, more wasp-waisted, have a WHR smaller than 1, the ideal being close to .7.


Singh came to the conclusion that across the ages, across cultures, regardless of body fat levels or preferences for fuller breasts or butts, the .7 WHR remains a rock solid predictor of female desirability.

Now the BBC's news site has a story about Dr. Singh's latest research:

Slim waists have been the mark of attractive women throughout history, says a U.S. scholar who has analysed thousands of ancient texts. Dr. Devendra Singh scoured references to fictional beauties from modern times back to early Indian literature.


He found that slimness was the most common term of praise from an author.


The study, published in a Royal Society journal, adds to evidence highlighting the role of the ratio between waist and hips in attracting a mate.

The article says he studied more than 30,000 texts, including erotic poetry from ancient India and China. And, while breasts were the most common female feature mentioned in those writings, slim waists came up 66 times. So, across history, there's some consistency in what turns our cranks, even if there were some moments when the ideal shifted:

There was trend for slightly larger women in the 17th and 18th centuries -- a trend typified by the paintings of Rubens -- but demand for a slimmer waist was generally constant throughout the centuries.


Dr. Singh said: "The common historical assumption in the social sciences has been that the standards of beauty are arbitrary, solely culturally determined and in the eye of the beholder. The finding that the writers describe a small waist as beautiful suggests instead that this body part -- a known marker of health and fertility -- is a core feature of feminine beauty that transcends ethnic differences and cultures."

Isn't it nice to know there's a biological reason why pictures like this tend to raise the temperature in the room.

(Thanks to our man in Scotland, Rannoch Donald, for the link. Welcome back!)

Tags: sex