According to a comprehensive study presented by the Texas Christian University, the physical attractiveness of people was found related to the state of the immune system.
Is Physical Attractiveness Connected to Immune System?
The final three Miss Universe contestants (L-R), Miss Paraguay, Nadia Ferreira; Miss South Africa, Lalela Mswane; and Miss India, Harnaaz Sandhu, pose on stage during the 70th Miss Universe beauty pageant in Israel's southern Red Sea coastal city of Eilat on December 13, 2021.
The new research suggests an idea on how people's attractiveness is being driven by the working immune system in their bodies. However, the study still needs more evidence to prove how the two distinct human aspects correlate.
The beauty of people is among the basic but complicated topics that scientists have been struggling with. Explanations behind beauty are still uncovered despite many investigations since discovering evolution.
Social standards and sexual selection are the common factors that experts are trying to analyze to clarify the secret of beauty and attraction. But the vagueness of the physical appearance might be more than we first thought.
While we have been making sense of how beauty works, natural selection Charles Darwin did not think it is explainable through genetic studies and better health.
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Healthy People Might Appear as Physically Attractive
Despite how the universal constants on beauty divide the scientific community, there have been records from the ancient to the modern-day culture that vary on how they find physical features attractive.
But today, the abstract explanations behind the attraction can now be put to rest, as a new study proposes a possible solution to the problem. Based on the new paper, a person's physical appeal may have been depending all this time on how healthy they are. The authors imply that this physical marker could benefit an offspring's survival.
Even though they collected potential pieces to defend the assumption, the authors said that further examinations must be met to have a complete grasp on principles of physical attraction.
The investigation was made possible through the help of 159 young adults. Each of the participants had pictures rated by a separate 492 people through an online survey.
The immune health, inflammations, and other self-reported health of each of the "models" were also evaluated to compare it with how their facial appearances are perceived.
According to the authors' statistics, the participants who scored more in attractiveness were relatively healthy in terms of their immune functions, including their bacterial immunity.
The results showed no links between the subjects' attractiveness and inflammation levels. With that said, the experts concluded that facial attractiveness manifests due to a healthy immune system rather than acute conditions.
In theory, it could be assumed that facial attractiveness can be used to assess if a mate can impact the health of a future offspring, reports Science Alert.
In sex differences, male participants with high-functioning natural killer cells scored higher. On the other hand, female participants tend to score higher if they had gradual bacterium growth in their plasma.
Cultural factors and genes were not thoroughly examined during the experiments, making a large explanation of beauty perception unsolved. The authors said the relationship between health and immune functions might no longer occur due to the advancements of modern medicine that help low immunocompetent groups to maintain relatively good health.
Further research is expected to explore the beauty and identify what drives both physical attractiveness and immunity to work with each other. The study was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, titled "More than just a pretty face? The relationship between immune function and perceived facial attractiveness."
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