Free Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire–Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do by Alan S. Miller, Satoshi Kanazawa

Britney Spears, who was at the time the perfect image of a virginal, nubile princess. Well, you know what has happened to her lately. Next candidate, please!
    As we sought yet again to replace Britney Spears with another perfect image of female beauty, it dawned on us that, no matter whom we would choose to use, she would be out of date pretty soon because of the high premium placed on youth for the ideal female beauty. (Had we written this book thirty years ago, this section would have been titled “Why Do Men Like Farrah Fawcett-Majors [and Why Do Women Want to Look Like Her]?” It would have made our book look really dated by now; Farrah Fawcett turned 60 in 2007.) Since we want our book to be read for a long time and don’t ever want it to look dated, we finally decided not to use an actual example of a blonde bombshell.
    Long Hair
    Men in general prefer women with long hair. 6 And most young women choose to grow their hair long. Once again, men’s preference for women with long hair is probably the reason for women’s preference to grow their hair long. The question thus is: Why do men prefer women with long hair?
    Because the human fetus grows inside the woman’s body for nine months, and then the mother nurses the newborn baby for a few years afterward, the woman’s health is crucial for the well-being of the child. Sickly women do not make good mothers, to a significantly greater extent than sickly men do not make good fathers. Thus, men are interested in selecting healthy women to be the mothers of their children. Part of the reason that men prefer young women, besides their higher reproductive value and fertility, is that younger women tend to be healthier on average than older women.
    How can men assess the health of their potential mates? There were no clinics in the ancestral environment; ancestral men had to judge women’s health by themselves. One accurate indicator of health is physical attractiveness, and this is the reason why men like beautiful women. (See the section, “Why Is Beauty Not in the Eye of the Beholder or Skin-Deep?” later in this chapter.) Another good indicator of health is hair. Healthy people (men and women) have lustrous, shiny hair, whereas the hair of sickly people loses its luster. During illness, a body needs to sequester all available nutrients (like iron and protein) to fight the illness. Since hair is not essential to survival (compared to, say, bone marrow), hair is the first place to which a body turns to collect the necessary nutrients. Thus, a person’s poor health first shows up in the condition of the hair. 7
    Further, hair grows very slowly, at about six inches per year. That means that if a woman has shoulder-length hair (two feet long), it accurately indicates her health status for the past four years, because once the hair grows there is nothing the bearer can do to change its appearance later. A woman might be healthy now, but if she was sick sometime in the past four years, her long hair would indicate her past sickly status. And there was nothing a woman could do in the ancestral environment to make her hair appear healthy and lustrous when she was not healthy. This is also why older women tend to keep their hair short, because they tend to become less healthy as they grow older, and they do not want telltale signs of their current health status hanging from their heads.
    If you want to see this process in action, try a little experiment on your own. Find a female stranger in a public place (like a park or a subway station). Observe her from behind, without looking at her face, her hands, her clothes, or anything else about her, and look only at her hair. Try to guess her age from the condition of her hair alone, nothing else. Once you come up with a guess for her age, pass by her, turn around to the front, and discreetly look at the woman’s face. You will find that you are very rarely surprised by her apparent age when