Abstract:
Various researchers have suggested that certain anthropometric ratios can be used to measure female body attractiveness, including the waist to hip ratio (WHR), Body Mass Index (BMI), and the body volume divided by the square of the height (Volume-Height Index). Based on a wide range of female subjects and virtual images of bodies with different ratios, Volume-Height Index (VHI) was found to provide the best fit with female body attractiveness, and the effect of Volume-Height Index can be fitted with two half bell-shaped exponential curves with an optimal Volume-Height Index at 14.2 liter/m2. It is suggested that the general trend of the effect of Volume- Height Index may be culturally invariant, but the optimal value of Volume-Height Index may vary from culture to culture. In addition to Volume-Height Index, other body parameters or ratios which reflect body proportions and the traits of feminine characteristics had smaller but significant effects on female body attractiveness, and such effects were stronger at optimum Volume-Height Index.

Excepts

Introduction: The question whether beauty exists objectively and universally has attracted debates among philosophers, psychologists, and biologists throughout the centuries.   • • •   Based on visual assessment of figure drawings and front or profile images, past researchers have suggested that the waist to hip ratio (WHR) and the Body Mass Index (BMI) were two putative ways of quantifying female physical attractiveness.   • • •   A previous study (Fan et al, 2004) showed that the body volume divided by the square of the height, defined as the Volume-Height Index, is potentially the best indicator of female body attractiveness, followed by BMI.   • • •   Here it is tested whether Volume-Height Index remains the best indicator of ratings of female body attractiveness, using a wide range of female subjects and virtual images, and further, how the effect relationship can be fitted with two half bell-shaped exponential curves to give an estimate of the optimal Volume-Height Index.
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Method:

Overall 102 real female bodies (31 Europeans & 71 Chinese) were scanned by a 3D body scanner, and 20 visual images of underweight women were created by Maya software. These images were made into standardized rotaing movie clips which were then randomly viewed and rated by 43 Hong Kong Chinese (20 men & 23 women). Attractiveness rating was on a 9-point Linert scal, with 1: least attrctive and 9: most attractive.
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Some Key Results

•   No significant difference between the ratings of male and female raters; this supports the mate-selection theory in evolution psychology that each sex understands what the opposite sex finds attractive.

•   Attractiveness rating can be related to VHI by the following fitted two-half bell-shaped exponential equations:

  •   To find out how relative body proportions affect the ratings of attractiveness of women having VHI close to optimum, several ratios of vertical and horizontal body measurements were considered. These include heights of waist, chin & hip, deviation of WHI from the "ideal" value of 0.7, bust-width to bust-depth, distance between nipples to bust side depth, as well as parameters of woman's posture like angles of back-pitch, hip-pich, bust-pitch & abdomen-pitch over vertical. They found that only two parameters mattered, namely waist-height to hip-height (WHRH) and bust width to bust depth (BWBD), and they derived the following equation: