Waist–hip ratio and attractiveness: New evidence and a critique of “a critical test”

An evolutionary model of mate choice predicts that humans should prefer honest signals of health, youth, and fertility in potential mates. Singh and others have amassed substantial evidence that the waist–hip ratio (WHR) in women is an accurate indicator of these attributes, and proposed that men respond to WHR as an attractiveness cue. In response to a recent study by Tassinary and Hansen [Psychol. Sci. 9 (1998) 150.] that purports to disconfirm Singh's hypothesis, we present evidence showing a clear relationship between WHR and evaluations of attractiveness. We evaluated responses to a range of waist, hip, and chest sizes, spanning the 1st through 99th percentiles of anthropometric data. Waist, hip, and chest sizes were altered independently to give WHRs of 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.9, and 1.2. We replaced line drawings with more realistic computer-manipulated photographs. The preferred WHR was 0.7, concordant with the majority of previous results. By asking participants to estimate weight in each stimulus figure, we were able to statistically control for the effects of weight on attractiveness judgments; the effect of WHR remained.