Why Do People Make Themselves Less Attractive?

Could there be an optimal amount of ugliness?

Note: The Fossils will take a break during the week of the July 4th holiday. Look for the next post on July 10th. Enjoy and be safe, all!

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There are limitless ways to be unattractive.

The reason for this is that organisms, including humans, come equipped with finely tuned aesthetic preferences, courtesy of evolution by natural selection.

If you’re a fiddler crab, you might well be attracted to a potential mate with one little claw and one huuuge one. That preference would guide you to mating with a member of your species, rather than one of those creatures with (ewww!) symmetrical claws. Fiddler crabs who were attracted to members of a different species didn’t leave a lot of (well, any) viable offspring, so that preference never got passed down. Humans, in general and in contrast, are not attracted to people with wildly asymmetrical limbs.

Wanna fiddle?

Beauty is, then, as Don Symons put it, “in the adaptations of the beholder.” Creatures are attracted to looks, sounds, tastes, and smells that correlate with a desirable (fitness-good) property. In the context of human mating, those desirable properties have to do with good health and good genes. Just like our fiddler crab friends, we have aesthetic adaptations guiding us toward mating with an individual of the right species, the right sex,¹ and the right age.

In my view, the best work that spells out the logic of this argument and the sorts of things that men and women are attracted to is The Mating Mind by Geoffrey Miller.² Miller suggests, for example, that we are attracted to symmetry—in sharp contrast to our Fiddling friends—because symmetry is a cue to good health and good genes. We favor clear, smooth skin, which is a cue to good health and a robust immune system, preventing infections that blemish the skin. While there is some cross-cultural variation, by and large people are attracted to body shapes and proportions that indicate fitness-good muscle tone, for example. People also care about hair, generally preferring hair that is relatively thick, uniform, and lustrous, like mine was a quarter of a century ago.

It's important to note that many of these traits are not just cues to health and genetics, but to age. Skin starts out clear and unwrinkled, but the years and miles don’t leave it that way. And, of course, as one ages, there’s an increasing likelihood that asymmetries will creep in, as we suffer the slings and arrows of, well, slings and arrows, not to mention genetic noise, disease, and other insults.

Now, none of this is to say that there isn’t important and interesting cross-cultural variation in what people find attractive. For example, some have suggested that males, universally, have a preference for a particular waist-to-hip ratio,³ though the topic has been and remains the subject of a certain amount of scholarly debate. In contrast, some body modifications viewed as attractive in one culture might not, shall we say, be to the taste of people from other cultures. This is to say nothing of individual variation in preferences. Chacun a son goût.

Unsurprisingly, because attracting a good mate is an important adaptive problem, people expend considerable time, energy, and resources trying to make themselves more physically attractive. Some of us even do CrossFit four or five times per week, though we are very reluctant to mention this in our posts or talk about it with everyone we meet. More generally, people have been modifying their appearance for some time, using pigments on their bodies and donning shells and other decorations as adornments. And it’s no small enterprise. Recent work suggests that today, women spend an average of four hours per day on this task, a bit more than men, who still spend an impressive three and a half or so. These efforts include the application of cosmetics, challenging one’s muscles and stamina, and so forth.

Some scholars have suggested that the sex difference, with women putting more effort into their physical appearance in many cultures, can be understood from a functional perspective. It begins with the idea that when it comes to mate choice, age is a more important trait for a female human than for a male, given the relationship between age and fertility.⁴ This fact, females’ declining fertility with age after the late teens, led to strong selection on males to have aesthetic systems that are especially tuned to cues to a potential partner’s age. This preference, in turn, led to females trying to signal their youth, a staple of marketing in the cosmetics industry. Some take this to extremes.

Pretty Ugly?

For the most part, people don’t modify themselves in ways that work in the opposite direction from evolved preferences. Unless it’s Halloween or some other occasion for dress-up, no one uses cosmetics to simulate a large infection on their cheek or to imitate the wrinkles of age. The same is true for other cues to ill health or poor genes. People don’t try to appear as if they have bad cases of acne, smallpox, or a botfly infestation.

Efforts to increase attractiveness are easy to explain, making exceptions to this pattern something of a curiosity.

Let’s take facial piercings.

Swami et al. (2011) found, for example, that for both men and women raters, pictures of people “with piercings were rated as less physically attractive and intelligent than those without piercings,⁵ with multiple piercings being accorded the most negative ratings.” Piercings affect job prospects as well. Subsequent research indicated that “individuals with piercings were viewed as less suitable job applicants and as possessing more negative characteristics than those with no piercings.”⁶ The negative professional impact of piercings make choices to get them even more mysterious.

So, what motivates facial piercings?

People usually alter their appearance to communicate something about themselves which otherwise might be unobservable. For instance, people signal their group affiliations with sweatshirts, hats, hair styles, jewelry and so on.  This explanation doesn’t seem to exactly work for facial piercings. It’s difficult to point to a particular group or tribe per se that piercings make you a part of in the same way that a Dolphins jersey or a t-shirt that says “Hope and Change” does.

One’s appearance can also be changed to signal  allegiance to sets of beliefs, norms, or values. In the mating context, beliefs and values are critical. For instance, someone who wants a large family is unlikely to be compatible in a long term relationship with someone who is committed to remaining childless. Similarly, and more subtly, people want to match with people with similar political views,⁷ a trend that has only accelerated amid recent turbulent times.

So, one possibility is that people are using piercings, as well as other adornments, to indicate to potential partners a set of values. The intuitive understanding of piercings is that it’s a statement about oneself, one’s ideals, and the community to which one belongs.

But why choose a signal that carries a cost?

It’s very tempting to take refuge in the usual answer from economics and evolutionary biology that costless signals will be ignored, but that’s not exactly true. As we have seen in cases of cooperative coordination, the signal need not be costly when interests are aligned. Big, costly signals are typically required when interests are in conflict. Small cheap signals are just fine when organisms are cooperating. Why the need for a costly signal in this case?

Negotiating Relationships.

Consider the game of chicken. Two cars are speeding at each other. The “winner” is the one who doesn’t swerve. A good strategy in this game is to throw your steering wheel out the window, ensuring the other person can see you’ve done so. They know you can’t turn out of the way, so now they must.

Now consider the negotiations over norms that govern relationships. Whether we like it or not, to some extent at least, as Pat Benatar said, Love is a Battlefield. Relationships entail a certain amount of negotiation, and this negotiation often has to do with power. Whose family will we visit during Thanksgiving? Who will do the chores? Is sex outside of the relationship acceptable and, if so, for both partners or only one? The answers to these questions are obviously highly consequential to the people involved. These negotiations inevitably and tragically include at least some degree of zero-sumness. We can’t visit both our families on Thanksgiving. Not all conflicts are consequential, though. If we do wind up at your relatives’ place for Thanksgiving, maybe I reserve the right not to wear a tie to dinner, even though you think I look good in one.  

Historically, these negotiations have been very heavily influenced by surrounding cultural norms. That is, it wasn’t just a matter of what the members of a couple might want. Society, as it were, dictated what was and was not acceptable in the context of a relationship. And in the past, much of the negotiation was, well, non-negotiable. In patriarchal societies, for example, the male partner simply made decisions. If the female partner did not behave accordingly, she was punished—not necessarily by the man himself, but by the community. Men had power because of the moral rules of the culture and because others would join his side in conflicts. A woman who committed adultery, for example, could be subjected to merciless punishment. This practice enforced a benefit craved by male partners: sexual exclusivity.

More generally, across many cultures, it’s reasonable to say that the norms helped males in relationships win.⁸ The negotiation within the relationship often led to a situation more in line with the male’s preferences than the female’s, and still in many places in the present.

Today, of course, these norms are much more up for grabs. While culture enforces some rules and norms, couples in the West, for example, are able to negotiate with relatively wide latitude. Who will earn money? Who will cook? How will each person behave with their partner, with friends, with strangers? People have interests across all these contexts, with different regimes imposing various costs or yielding benefits. Generally, as norms change, the surrounding culture makes it easier or harder for partners to get what they want out of the relationship and, today, the scope of negotiation is large.

The new flexibility in arrangements has many benefits, but it raises a new problem: how do you identify a partner who is interested in the same sort of negotiated relationship you are interested in? There are many more options than before. Will the couple be trad, as the online kids are saying these days, with traditional sex roles? Will the couple even be a couple, or will it be open to more, in a throuple or some sort of polycule.⁹  

Given the broad scope for negotiation, might be more value than ever in signaling to potential partners which norms one expects—and is committed to—in a relationship.

Which gets us to piercings. Suppose that there are some signals that reliably correlate with a more traditional, even patriarchal set of values. One might send these signals to indicate to a potential partner, hey, I expect traditional gender roles in my relationship. If that’s not for you, then I’m not for you. Symmetrically, suppose there are signals that reliably correlate with the opposite of that set of norms, often associated, rightly or wrongly, with various versions of “feminism.”

Facial piercings might be a way of saying: if you are in a relationship with me, the norms that we’ll operate under are from a particular basket. It’s not the 50s: I won’t be greeting you when you get home with a martini in one hand and my panties in the other. Not only that, but we’ll be spending our time with people who will roundly condemn you if you suggest that I ought to do that. This technique works for other sets of values as well. A prominent tattoo—82^nd Airborne, These colors don’t run, etc.—sends a different signal entirely.

Different aesthetics reflect (very) different values. Source for image. From the recent Eurovision competition.

Now, you might think that one could simply say these things out loud, saving the cost, but there are (at least) two problems with this approach. First, talk is cheap. Someone might say these things, but then fold when negotiations begin. Related, talk is slow. Telling each suitor one at a time is a serial process; a piercing broadcasts, in parallel.

Second, negotiation can be undermined if the argument comes across as selfish. It’s not persuasive to say, “I don’t want to work out because that’s less fun for me than scrolling Instagram.” In many contexts, one can offload this position onto culture: “In my moral community, people are healthy at any size and if you make any demands or requests about my appearance, well, that is seriously problematic hashtag male gaze.” In the past—and still in some places—it might not be persuasive to say “I don’t want to do any childcare because I don’t enjoy it” but you could perhaps get away with the idea that “in this culture the woman has a moral duty to take care of the kids,” or what have you. This style of argument in not only used in the context of mating, and everyone makes use of the same strategy. The line is: It’s not me. It’s not that I want benefits but no costs. It’s really just about what’s right and wrong, you see.

These negotiations, as always, will be affected by the relative mate values of the partners. A high mate value female will be able to extract more concessions from a lower mate value male than a high value male and, symmetrically for high mate value males. The range of negotiated arrangements is broader than in the past, but not without limits. For instance, very high mate value men in the past might have been able to negotiate adding a wife to an existing couple; custom and the law in many places now greys out this possibility.

In any case, to convince a partner, or a potential partner, using a signal to indicate the norms one endorses solves these problems. Facial piercings, and many other possible signals, including tattoos, body shape, certain clothing and hair styles, are costly, reducing one’s physical attractiveness and, in some cases, one’s job’s prospects.¹⁰ Bearing these costs signals that one is committed to one’s bargaining position, not unlike tossing out the steering wheel in the game of Chicken. Piercings signal that one isn’t going to change one’s mind. Their bargaining position—this set of norms rather than that set of norms—is fixed.

Even better, modifications that reduce attractiveness are a cost of the right sort. It’s a tangible signal: nope, I’m not going to conform to your beauty preferences. I’m not going to bear that cost.

You are.

1. By “right” I’m not making a moral judgment. As readers of my work know, I am a libertarian about such things and believe that consenting adults should be permitted to do whatever they like as long as others aren’t harmed. See chapter 10 of Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite, where I snuck in a bit of a libertarian rant. In any case, here I simply am speaking from the standpoint of evolution by natural selection. Generally, I will focus only on heterosexuality for this post.

2. See also The Evolution of Human Sexuality by Don Symons and The Evolution of Desire by David Buss.

3. For the purists, waist-to-hip ratio controlling for body mass index. See, for example, this paper.

4. In many taxa, especially birds, the males devote greater resources to their looks than females. Consider the difference between the peacock and the peahen. Again, see Miller’s book for a through explanation.

5. This result controls for the perceiver’s facial piercings. Swami, V., Stieger, S., Pietschnig, J., Voracek, M., Furnham, A., & Tovée, M. J. (2012). The influence of facial piercings and observer personality on perceptions of physical attractiveness and intelligence. European Psychologist.

6. I should probably add that I don’t have any reason to doubt these findings, but as a general matter I’m skeptical of all research published in psychology. For this post, I’ll assume this is true, but I allow the possibility that this line of work, like so much else, turns out to be a false positive.

7. For scholarly work on this topic, see the linked paper and, for example: Klofstad, Casey A., Rose McDermott, and Peter K. Hatemi. 2012. “Do Bedroom Eyes Wear Political Glasses? The Role of Politics in Human Mate Attraction.” Evolution and Human Behavior 33(2): 100–108.

8. The limitation here, males “in relationships,” is important. In polygamous cultures, there might have been unmated males—because some males had multiple mates—and those males are not aided by the group of norms and moral rules that help those men who are in relationships.

9. I have no idea if I’m getting these terms right.

10. There might be additional cost. For examples, these signals might dissuade some band of suitors that might be acceptable. Additionally, having committed to a set of norms, it might preclude reaching a negotiation with a partner because options are off the table.