Transcription
Today's video is sponsored by Squarespace. Sexual selection theory is the idea that certain physical traits are seen as attractive as they represent beneficial qualities in an individual that can be passed on to their offspring. These attractive physical traits influence humans and animals to select certain mates, as they believe it gives their offspring the best chance of survival.
We could spend all our time looking at primitive examples like the peacock's tail, in which a large size and brightly colored plumage represents a male peacock's overall fitness. Or we could look at potentially more relevant examples in facial aesthetics, like the idea that red cheeks indicate healthy blood flow—an indicator of good health that could be then passed on to your offspring—or that a symmetrical face indicates less developmental imperfection and is also a good indicator of health. There are plenty of indicators of genetic fitness, and we've looked at almost all of them on the channel over the past two years. But one thing that we haven't really looked at in detail is the idea of hair and hairstyles; the idea that well-maintained long hair indicates wealth, which is of course beneficial to potential mate's offspring. While we do know that the quality of your hair, such as your hair density, could be indicative of your genetic fitness or your social status, what we don't know is how attractive a certain hairstyle is versus another. Today, we're going to dive deeper into how an individual's hairstyle can be a message or a display of an individual's phenotypical quality; in other words, how do hairstyles represent our genes such that we can potentially give it to our offspring? Mind you, hairstyles are an example of grooming adaptations; we can change them; our children can have different hairstyles to us; but for some reason, they seem to indicate some type of evolutionary benefit, and so that's what we're going to be looking at today.
One such Hungarian study from 2003 examined this, studying the effects of six different hairstyles relative to faces without any hair to examine three evolutionary hypotheses. The first was known as the covering hypothesis, which postulated that the function of hair in relation to beauty is its ability to accentuate or hide certain facial features. As sexual dimorphism is seen as a highly attractive sexual selection trait, people may use their head hair to hide or accentuate other characteristics that are not particularly sexually dimorphic, or to accentuate the ones that are. An example of this would be that short hair may disclose particular hormonal markers in a woman's face, which may increase attractiveness. The opposite of this would be women utilizing long hair to conceal insecurities or factors of their face that they're not too fond of, such as having a large forehead. The specific predictions for this hypothesis are: one, that a short hairstyle will increase the attractiveness of women whose facial traits are judged highly feminine or attractive by men; and two, that long hairstyles are expected to increase the attractiveness of women who possess less feminine and more masculine, so higher testosterone-dependent rates. Now, as I said before, the Hungarian study focuses around the concept that raters judge the attractiveness of faces with certain hairstyles relative to those faces without hairstyles; so, in other words, the control do not have any hairstyle, as just to assess the face by itself.
The second hypothesis is known as the healthy mate theory. The theory is pretty self-explanatory; it states that certain traits can inform others of an individual's actual pathogen load; in other words, an idea of genetic fitness. To simplify, a pathogen is any organism that can cause disease. So in this series, we're basically saying that certain traits, such as a certain sized nose or a certain length of hair, can alert a partner of that person's susceptibility to disease. When we look specifically at hair quality, healthy mate theory would postulate that attractive hairstyles are attractive because they represent a lack of external pathogens, like lice or fleas, that could then harm a potential mate or a potential mate's offspring. It does seem that a lot of this complicated terminology has been used here, but to put it in simple terms, you wouldn't be too keen to go on a date with someone if it looked like they had nits. Right? So with that in mind, the specific prediction for this hypothesis is that unkempt, disordered, or disheveled hair decreased perceived facial attractiveness—pretty self-explanatory.
The final hypothesis is the good genes model. We've spoken about this before; it states that attractiveness is meaningful in human interactions because it simply advertises good genes. The two specific predictions of this hypothesis are: one, that as a general rule, longer hair on females would be seen as more attractive regardless of their individual's attractiveness or facial features, purely because it signals better health—so hair is independent of your facial attractiveness, which, if true, could be a very big thing; and two, that an individual's length of hair is associated with their health state, meaning that women with long hairstyles will be consciously regarded as more attractive than those with shorter hair because it's harder to maintain longer hair from a physiological perspective.
So now that you've gotten all these hypotheses and predictions down, before we get into it, just take a moment to like and subscribe to the channel, and we'll dig in. This study took 77 subjects from a Hungarian university; so mind you, we're not looking at kinked or curled hair as many Arabian or African women do have. We will look at that in a second, in a later study, but for now we're looking at straight hair, more of a Eurocentric or Caucasian-centric perspective. The participants had a mean age of 22, so they're all very physically healthy. There were photos taken of them, and then computer-based technology was used to remove all of their hair. From here, 52 male raters were presented with photos of the female subjects without any visible hair and were asked to rate their facial attractiveness to get a baseline of their face versus their hair. After this preliminary rating, the 10 most attractive and 10 least attractive faces were taken and morphed together, with the subject pool narrowed to 20 females. And each subject was given an artificial technological hair transplant, providing each participant with short, medium, long, disheveled hair in a knot, and unkempt hair. And after this, a further 52 male raters were presented first the 20 basic faces with no hair, and then 120 ordered pictures of the 20 females with each of the six different hairstyles. Right? So they're taking all the attractive—the most attractive, the least attractive faces—they're morphing them together, and they're giving them all these different hairstyles versus a control which has no hair for comparison.
If you look at the ratings of the 20 chosen faces with no implanted hairstyle—so the control—we're going to see that the 10 most attractive faces have significantly higher ratings of femininity, youth, health, and sexiness, corresponding to significant F values and probability values. In other words, this isn't just a statistical anomaly; we're confirming that the most attractive faces are indeed the most attractive faces. The next table uncovers the differences for a particular face when given a certain hairstyle. As we can see, medium-length hair significantly improves the perceived femininity, sexiness, and health of a particularly unattractive woman when compared to no hair at all. Going even further, we can see that having long hair results in even further improvements when compared to medium-length hair, and similar results occur for particularly attractive women, with medium and long hair being the best predictors of an individual's health, femininity, youth, and sexiness. So it seems that hair does have a positive effect, but only for people in the lower range of the attractiveness quartile.
So from this study, as we can see, overall long and medium-length hair are related to the highest ratings of facial attractiveness, while no hair and short, disheveled hair and unkempt hair were predictors of the lowest facial attractiveness. Looking at this figure, we can see that long hair improves unattractive women the most, whereas compared to attractive women, it's not that big of a difference. This may be why we see certain attractive women being able to break the rule and look outstandingly beautiful with short hair, as the benefits of long hair are diminished if you're already very attractive. This idea is confirmed to the next figure, in which we can see that the relative peaks of attractiveness for already attractive women, shown by the white bars, are already high and don't change considerably for each hairstyle.
So in summary, the most attractive women can get away with any hairstyle, same as the most attractive men, because it doesn't make much of a difference what they do; their greatest benefit is coming from their facial attractiveness, and the hair is simply a supplement. Whereas for less attractive women, having medium to longer length hair does indicate the idea of genetic fitness, and so it does boost their attractiveness up, but it does depend… I did cover this before in a previous video, but the likes of the women that can actually pull off short hair, like Ruby Rose, have incredibly masculine and lean features, which is why they can pull off a more masculine hairstyle, or something that's more typically associated with men, such as shorter hair, because they just have the right features. So having a strong jaw, having defined cheeks, are the prerequisites for being able to pull off shorter hair. Although you can pull off shorter hair with more rounded features, it will just put you into a different, more gamine aesthetic, such as the likes of Audrey Hepburn or Ed Cedric. You can see in this example of Miley Cyrus with shorter hair, she has more of a heart-shaped face, and you can tell this by the point of your chin and the angle of her jaw, on how the jaw inclination comes towards the chin, and it does work on her face. But another thing you need to keep in mind with women who can pull off shorter hair is the amount of frontotemporal recession they have. So we covered this in a previous video, and I recommend you look at that, but you want to generally have a more juvenile hairline. So there are many, many more prerequisites to being able to pull off shorter hair for women than there are for being able to pull off longer hair, and this is just due to the heteronormative standards that we're used to.
Here's the thing, however: longer hair is in that gray zone between being a Eurocentric standard and being a biological standard. Because in our East and South Asian beauty standards videos, we found that long, dark hair is the preferred norm for most women there. While these places are influenced by global Eurocentric beauty standards, they're not as heavily influenced as the Anglosphere itself. So in that sense, straight hair could be considered a biological standard because it's just the norm that most people around the world have. However, this does exclude a large minority of African and Arabian women who have more curled, coiled, or kinky hair—however you wish to say it. So trying to achieve straight, medium-length hair, as we see in this research paper, is a) not going to be the same for them; and b) the process of hair straightening for particularly African Americans has a very long and difficult history towards it. From *Black Women, Beauty, and Hair: A Matter of Being*, by Cheryl Thompson, 2009: traditional and natural kinky African hairstyles were deemed as unattractive by Europeans and were often derogatorily referred to as wool rather than actual hair. As such, in an attempt to assimilate with white culture, many women straightened their hair, and this was seen as a symbol of now joining the middle class. So hair actually had a socio-economic role. Early African entrepreneurs, such as C.J. Walker, sold hair-straightening products to predominantly African women in an attempt to leverage this new socio-economic standard. So essentially, hair is now a cultural standard rather than simply a biological one. However, the Civil Rights movements of the later half of that century changed ideas to rejecting white conformity of hairstyles to appreciating the natural hairstyles of curled hair. Quote: "A real Black person adorned a natural hairstyle," while those who straightened their hair were deemed fake for attempting to emulate a white aesthetic and an unnatural Black look.
So what does all this mean? Well, it means that the research that we looked at doesn't apply to everyone, especially not people with curled hair. In many workplaces, having Afrocentric hair was indeed deemed as being less professional, and we still see the effects of that today. And so while we can't exactly quantify what the ideal curled hairstyle would be—say, dreadlocks better than afros—simply because of a lack of research, we can look at how they're perceived by people in society. From *The Effect of Hairstyles on the Perception of Black Women's Personality and Earning Potentials*, by Pope and Slay, we see that there is a small, but still circumstantial, preference for curly hair versus dreadlocks, which are seen as less professional, and this trend was the case by gender—so men and women rating a Black woman for her competence based on a hairstyle. However, we see differences when comparing by race, where Black men and women rate afros to be much more competent in the workplace than say dreadlocks or straight hair. What's most interesting to me is that even though the previous research from 2004—the Hungarian paper—said that straight hair was the most ideal, this paper doesn't suggest that to be the case for Black women, where straight hair is less attractive compared to say afros or curly hair or even dreadlocks. While Black participants rated the afroed hair as the most competent in the workplace, white participants rated the afroed hair as the least competent. In reality, it would seem that the effect of straightening hair for curled hair—so for African women who are straightening their hair in order to fit a certain agenda—it doesn't seem to work in their favor, as the history would suggest and as contemporary research finds. The best hairstyle that's suited for your face is the one that grows out naturally.
However, the answer isn't as simple as I'm making it seem. From *The Hair Dilemma: Conform to Mainstream Expectations or Emphasize Racial Identity*, by Rosa and Dumas, the right balance of femininity and attractiveness can benefit a woman in the workplace, but traditional American culture views Black women as less feminine and less attractive, as well as less intelligent, competent, and dependable in their professional positions than their white counterparts. Awareness of these negative perceptions causes Black women to be especially concerned about whether their hairstyle promotes a professional image. So while the question of what the quote-unquote ideal hairstyle would be for a Caucasian sample or an Asian sample is quite easy to answer in the Anglosphere, the reality for their Black counterparts is much more culturally ingrained. So this wouldn't really be the video to tell you what the ideal hairstyle is for Black women, but the rules of hair density, hairlines, and frontotemporal recession still apply, just like they do with all women from our previous videos. So in an attempt to be more inclusive, we've tried to include curled hair, but there just isn't enough research, and their answer to it is much more, like I said, culturally sensitive, because there's many confounding factors that science just can't research from a laboratory setting.
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