When Viren Swami, Ph.D., started his graduate work in psychology, he happened upon the Venus de Milo at Paris’s Louvre Museum. He was struck by her imperfections. “It’s not symmetrical; she’s cracked all over the place,” he says. “She’s missing a foot.” (Not to mention both of her arms.) The Venus de Milo wasn’t always revered, Swami submits—but today she is. What he took from the sculpture’s history: Our beauty ideals are not set in stone.
It’s a fitting metaphor for Swami’s work. A Reader in Psychology at the University of Westminster in London and YouBeauty Attraction Expert, Swami has hit upon this concept in dozens of studies focused on cross-cultural standards of attractiveness.
“One of the things I’m interested in is how these ideas are really malleable,” Swami says. “They’re not fixed in time, they’re not fixed in place.”
While earning his undergraduate degree in psychology at University College London, Swami first became interested in the way cultures’ beauty standards evolve. In his doctorate work at the same school, he honed in on the range of factors that influence which body types we find attractive, such as media, upbringing and even our current mental state.
As lead author of "The International Body Project," published in 2010 in The Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Swami, his colleague, David Frederick, and an international team of researchers surveyed more than 7,400 people in 26 countries about their concept of the ideal female form. Among most of the sites—socioeconomically-developed, urban areas, including Los Angeles, Toronto, London and Melbourne—differences in body weight preferences were minor. No big shock: Men and women alike found a slender physique most attractive. But in poor regions of Malaysia and South Africa, people far favored heavier figures.
“Body fat is acting as an indicator of status,” Swami theorizes. In poor, rural areas, the richer you are, the more likely you are to be heavy, since you can afford to buy more food and avoid working with your hands. The opposite might be true in urban areas, where money begets a gym membership and organic vegetables.
The pattern held true within cultures, as well. There was a fairly uniform preference for heavier figures among groups of lower socioeconomic status, and for thinner figures among groups of higher socioeconomic status.
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