Stealing Beauty: Pivot Point International v ... - UW Law School

2006:1067 Stealing Beauty 1093
composite face. 157 Langlois and Roggman concluded, therefore, that the
most attractive people were “not blessed with rare physical qualities,”
but features that “approximate the mathematical average of all faces in a
particular population.” 158 This conclusion suggests that people tend to
find the most average, or commonly occurring, features in human beings
attractive.
Langlois also argues that our ideas of beauty have their foundation
in infancy. In a separate study, she asked several hundred adults to rate
each face in a collection of sixteen as moderately attractive or
moderately unattractive. 159 She then presented the same faces to infants,
and measured how long the babies gazed at each category of faces. 160
Langlois found that the babies gazed longer at the faces that the adults
deemed attractive, 161 regardless of the race of the child or adult viewing
the face. 162 These findings suggest that there is some combination of
facial features that appeal to us despite cultural influences. 163
Studies have also shown that there are specific physical traits that
are physically desirable among men and women regardless of the cultural
background of the beholder. Michael Cunningham, the prolific scientist
from the University of Louisville, has reached scientific conclusions that
157. Id.
158. Id. A valid critique of this study, however, is that it primarily focused on
Caucasian samples and did not sufficiently include faces from other races. Langlois
predicted that a composite of a different racial group would also be judged more
attractive than the individual faces making up the composite, regardless of the racial
background of the beholder. Id. at 299. Even so, this argument is consistent with the
idea that different cultures have different beauty standards for its members, and one
universal standard of beauty cannot be applied cross-culturally.
159. Bruce Bower, Baby Face-Off: The Roots of Attraction, 131 SCI. NEWS 310
(1987) [hereinafter Bower, Face-Off].
160. Id.
161. Id. These results have been repeated in other studies. See, e.g., Susie
Weldon, Why It’s a Perk to Be Pretty; Even Newborn Babies Love a Pretty Face, W.
DAILY PRESS (Bristol, U.K.), Feb. 21, 2000, at 6 (presenting a study similar to Langlois’
in which babies spent approximately twice as much time gazing at faces adults deemed
physically attractive).
162. See Bower, Average Attractions, supra note 155, at 299.
163. Langlois’ study does not posit that infants understand the societal construct
of beauty. Rather, she hypothesizes that “attractive faces may be more curved, less
angular and more vertically symmetrical than unattractive faces,” features are known to
be preferred by infants. See Bower, Face-Off, supra note 160. Langlois is also not
necessarily mitigating the argument that cultural differences affect a certain culture’s
perception of what is beautiful. Instead, she argues that a “‘universal standard of
attractiveness’ may interact with cultural factors and changing conceptions of beauty over
time.” Id.