Body attractiveness: Difference between revisions

This likely means that the interaction between facial and bodily attractiveness is highly complex, with there likely being minimal thresholds of both that need to be exceeded in order for a man to be considered 'attractive' by women; though it is clear that both, individually, contribute substantially to the variance to women's perceptions of male physical attractiveness.

Further, on this point, many lookism theorists claim that working out in order to increase one's attractiveness to women (which is often dubbed 'gymcelling') is useless if one has a particularly unattractive face. In contrast to this claim, the studies authors found more substantial evidence for an opposite effect, i.e., in some male subjects, their gestalt physical attractiveness was dragged down in a dramatic way when their bodies were relatively unattractive compared to their faces.

Conversely, body attractiveness mattered relatively much more to men when evaluating women exclusively for short-term relationships. The mating context-related primes had less influence on women's evaluations of the relative importance of bodily and facial attractiveness, which were stable across both conditions.