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African perceptions of female attractiveness

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Coetzee2012PLoS0048116AfricanPerceptions.pdf (797.9Kb)
Date
29/10/2012
Author
Coetzee, Vinet
Faerber, Stella J
Greeff, Jaco M
Lefevre, Carmen Emilia
Re, Daniel
Perrett, David Ian
Funder
The British Academy
Grant ID
WRP/2008/87
Keywords
BF Psychology
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Abstract
Little is known about mate choice preferences outside Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic societies, even though these Western populations may be particularly unrepresentative of human populations. To our knowledge, this is the first study to test which facial cues contribute to African perceptions of African female attractiveness and also the first study to test the combined role of facial adiposity, skin colour (lightness, yellowness and redness), skin homogeneity and youthfulness in the facial attractiveness preferences of any population. Results show that youthfulness, skin colour, skin homogeneity and facial adiposity significantly and independently predict attractiveness in female African faces. Younger, thinner women with a lighter, yellower skin colour and a more homogenous skin tone are considered more attractive. These findings provide a more global perspective on human mate choice and point to a universal role for these four facial cues in female facial attractiveness.
Citation
Coetzee , V , Faerber , S J , Greeff , J M , Lefevre , C E , Re , D & Perrett , D I 2012 , ' African perceptions of female attractiveness ' , PLoS One , vol. 7 , no. 10 , e48116 . https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0048116
Publication
PLoS One
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0048116
ISSN
1932-6203
Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2012 Coetzee et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Collections
  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/3271

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