Averageness Isn’t Enough: What Actually Makes a Body Look Attractive?
Photo by SHVETS Production / Pexels (faces blurred for anonymity).
– by Zihan Zhu, Lan Chen, and Ying Hu
Think about the last time you saw someone and thought, “They have a great figure.” What were you reacting to: something ordinary, or something that stood out? For decades, research on faces has pointed to a clear answer: averageness is attractive. Composite faces, blended from many individual faces, are consistently rated as more appealing than the originals, possibly because looking average signals health or biological quality. Body shape also varies along many dimensions, curvier or straighter, more or less muscular, and so on, yet it has received far less attention than faces. Does the same rule extend to bodies? Is a body more attractive simply because it sits closer to the average, or is something else going on?
To find out, we conducted two studies. In the first, 72 participants, 36 in the United States and 36 in China, rated 140 computer-generated 3D bodies (70 female, 70 male) that varied naturally along ten underlying dimensions of body shape. For each body, participants gave two separate ratings: how typical it looked (how representative it was of bodies in general) and how attractive it looked.
The two ratings were positively related. Bodies rated as more typical were also, on average, rated as more attractive, a pattern observed among both American and Chinese participants and for both female and male bodies. So, are typicality and attractiveness just two names for the same judgment? Not quite. When we examined what specifically predicted each rating, a different picture emerged.
We tested two competing explanations. One is that a body looks typical or attractive to the extent that it sits close to the population average — call it the “distance from average” rule. The other is that judgments depend not just on distance, but on which specific direction a body deviates in — call it the “specific direction” rule. Typicality was more closely tied to the first rule overall: bodies closer to the average tended to look more typical. Attractiveness, by contrast, was better captured by the second rule, with simple distance from average generally providing a weaker explanation. What mattered more was direction: bodies rated as highly attractive showed patterned departures from the average, including visible differences in curvature or muscularity, rather than simply being the most average bodies. This broad pattern was observed among both American and Chinese raters, even though the two cultures do not always agree on what an ideal body looks like.
To test this more directly, we ran a second, preregistered study using caricature and morphing. Using the ratings from Study 1, we built two composite bodies — one by averaging the five bodies rated most typical, and the other by averaging the five bodies rated most attractive. We then exaggerated the difference between them to create two caricatures: a “super-typical” body and a “super-attractive” body. Morphing gradually between these two caricatures produced an 11-step continuum, and a new sample of participants rated bodies at each step, some judging attractiveness, others typicality. We ran this twice, once letting body height vary naturally and once holding height constant, to make sure that height itself was not driving the results. Across a total of 353 participants, both versions, and both cultural samples, the same pattern held: as bodies moved toward the attractive end, attractiveness ratings increased overall, while typicality ratings did not increase in parallel, instead remaining broadly stable or decreasing toward the attractive end. Becoming more attractive did not mean becoming more typical, whether or not height was held constant.
Put together, the two studies suggest that typicality and attractiveness are related but not interchangeable judgments. Both may draw on the same underlying map of possible body shapes, but they read that map differently. Typicality asks a simple question: how close is this body to everyone else’s average? Attractiveness asks a more selective one: does this body show the “right” departures from the average, along dimensions like curvature and muscularity that plausibly carry information about health or reproductive fitness? Most bodies near the average do not show pronounced versions of these features, which is why typical and attractive bodies usually go together. But when a body’s shape leans strongly into these specific directions, the two judgments can pull apart. That is not the same as saying that unusual bodies are attractive; deviation from the average alone is not enough to explain attractiveness. It is the direction that counts, not distinctiveness for its own sake.
So the next time someone strikes you as having “a great figure,” your reaction may not be just about how ordinary or unusual they look overall. It may also be about whether their shape leans into a handful of specific features — a bit more curve here, a bit more muscle there — that read as attractive regardless of how average everything else is. Averageness still matters. It is an important cue to typicality, and typical bodies are, on the whole, seen as reasonably attractive too. It is just not the whole story.
