Researchers at the University of Konstanz in Germany found that the women people rate as most attractive tend to have a pronounced S-shaped curve from bust to hips.
This may explain why curvy stars like Marilyn Monroe and Kim Kardashian are often seen as more attractive than slimmer celebrities. The finding challenges earlier studies that promoted a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7 as the ideal — meaning the waist is about 30 percent narrower than the hips.
In past years, researchers favored that 0.7 ratio, in part because wider hips and more fat distributed in the lower body have been linked to childbearing and motherhood. Evolutionary psychologists argued our brains might find that ratio especially appealing.
Other researchers suggested a lower waist-to-hip ratio might only look attractive on women with lower overall body mass.
The lead author of the new study, Professor Ronald Hübner, says the waist-to-hip ratio is only one part of a larger curve that defines what many people perceive as an ideal figure.
What Did the Authors of the New Study Report?
The team at Konstanz argues that a slim waist isn’t necessary for an attractive female body. Instead, the overall elegance of the silhouette — the pronounced curve running from bust to hips — plays a bigger role. That’s likely welcome news for curvier women, since a narrowly defined slim waist is no longer the top priority.
In the first experiment, Professor Hübner’s team showed 80 men and women 12 linear drawings of different female body types. Participants rated each figure on a scale from 1 to 100, where 1 represented “completely unattractive” and 100 represented “extremely attractive.”
The curves in each drawing were matched to specific waist-to-hip ratios, so both potential indicators of attractiveness appeared together. That made it harder for participants to judge the two features separately. The researchers wanted to test whether the classic waist-to-hip ratio actually predicts attractiveness. Based on the volunteers’ responses, the old theory held up: figures with a waist-to-hip ratio close to 0.7 were rated as more attractive.
For women of “normal” weight with those proportions, the average score was about 74. By contrast, a body with the same weight but a 1:1 ratio averaged 54, according to the Daily Mail.
The Advantage of a Pronounced Curve
In the second experiment, researchers created drawings in which the overall body curve and the waist-to-hip ratio were deliberately misaligned. That let the team see which feature — the curve or the ratio — mattered more to observers.
The drawings were based on photographs of real women wearing extremely tight corsets to exaggerate the most pronounced curves.
Ninety-eight volunteers rated those figures using the same 1-to-100 scale. As before, a 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio was rated most attractive for smaller body types. But for curvier bodies, that ratio stopped being a reliable predictor of attractiveness. The most voluptuous woman — whose body matched the coveted 0.7 ratio — received only 17 points.
Across weights, torsos with more pronounced S-shaped curves from bust to hips were rated the most attractive, regardless of waist-to-hip ratio.
In a report published in Scientific Reports, Professor Hübner and his colleagues wrote: “Theoretical considerations suggest that the waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) cannot be a reliable indicator of attractiveness, as is commonly believed. Therefore, one of the two features must be a more effective predictor of female body attractiveness. The results of the study clearly showed that the curve significantly surpasses WHR in this regard.”
Of course, in real life every woman is most beautiful to the person who loves her. Put another way: the most attractive woman is the one who is loved.
