Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty [Hardcover]

Etcoff's approach then is that of a 'scientist' rather than of a philosopher, and in a fast paced and expert survey of recent research she argues persuasively the following that 'beauty' is more than in the eye of the beholder - it is a cross-cultural reality. Etcoff illustrates this with a number of studies showing how people from different races and cultures nonetheless will rank other people unerringly in order of attractiveness.

The reason people do this, Etcoff says, is that they have been programmed by millennia of evolution to identify the most 'fertile' partner. Men look for women who have the 'hour glass' shape because this maximises the chance of the woman being old enough to bear children, but young enough not to be either pregnant already or breast-feeding (in which case she is not fertile.) Women, equally, look for square jawed, tall dark and handsome men, who thereby illustrate not only their masculinity but their ability to help bring up children.

And there we have perhaps one of the first objections to Etcoff's book. It is full of supposedly incontrovertible 'scientific' statements, mixed up with really rather weak pieces of common-sense which are little more than the currency of turn of then century Harvard University.

Etcoff does not actually say 'the most beautiful of all women are blonde americans' but she comes pretty close to it. She certainly does say 'gentlemen prefer blondes', and she does say men are programmed to prefer paler skin to darker skin. She says men do not like 'hairy' women, and without going into details here (!) she is again pointing at the 'Playboy' blonde and away from the classical brunette let alone the African, Asian or South American racial types. Similarly, she insists that the lithe, muscular body is a natural preference - in the face of the evidence she herself cites (think of all those awful Renaissance 'picnics in arcadia' scenes!) that for most places and most periods, women who are plump and evidently more leisured, have been considered the more lovely to behold.

But perhaps the main objection must be that being attractive is not the same thing a s being beautiful - there is a degree of cross-over obviously, but to treat the two terms as interchangeable , as Etcoff does here, is unscientific not to say unphilosophical. Her main point, it turns out, is little more than a sleight-of-hand - she exchanges 'beauty' for 'attractive' and then substitutes for this 'most fertile looking'.

Other writers have taken a quite different slant. Naomi Wolf attributes all sorts of malign effects to notions of beauty (anorexia, anxiety, stress, low self-esteem, sexual harassment, incest and rape) - and none of the good ones. Wolf, describes in 'The Beauty Myth' how historically several types of beauty have been esteemed, and how "the qualities that a given period calls beautiful in a woman are merely symbols of the female behaviour that that period considers desirable". The reason women wear make-up and are constantly dieting is that they have been taken in by a kind of cult religion - the cult being that of the body beautiful. And men are also victims, not only in their recent search for the "elusive six pack", but in that they are unable to relate to women as they really are.

Etcoff accepts all that, and much of the book is a valuable account of social scientific evidence of just this sort of 'discrimination'. But is there something underlying beauty that is timeless, that is fundamental? Of course, like the form of beauty' described by the female philosopher, Diotima, to Socrates in Plato's Symposium, it will not be peculiar to the human female, but a quality to be found in males and indeed all of nature too.