Bombshell Aesthetics: The Most Attractive Female Body (Full Article)

(Updated March, 2015) I figure there’s no sense denying that when it comes to dating, love and relationships, well, physical attractiveness matters. We’re very visually perceptive and we infer a lot from how people look. Whether that’s right or wrong, that’s just how us humans work. The research clearly shows that whether or not people say they value physical attractiveness they still base their actions on it. Hell, even the people who truly believe that they don’t care about physical attractiveness still care about it just as much as everyone else when it comes down to who they actually date. (study, study)

These studies show that this is equally true for both men and women. Everyone places a great deal of importance on physical attractiveness. (Other very attractive traits include warmness and compassion, earning potential, etc, yet surprisingly these traits are seemingly far less important, at least at first.)
Is that the best way to pick a partner? Who knows. Probably not. However this isn’t an article about what we should find attractive, this is an article about what we do find attractive. Some of it might surprise you. Most people guess incorrectly about quite a bit of it. Just in case you disagree though, I’ll cite all my sources so that you can draw your own conclusions.
On that note, this article is long. I’ll understand if you don’t want to read the whole thing, so here’s a quick and simple trick to make yourself instantly sexier: have a drink. It will boost your attractiveness (to yourself) by 50%. This is called the reverse beer goggles effect, aka, Beauty is in the Eye of the Beer Holder. (study) Best of all, you don’t even need to have a real drink – the placebo effect is more than enough – you only have to think you’re having a real drink.
If you’re looking for a more wholesome and longer lasting aesthetic improvement, or perhaps an improvement that other people will notice too, don’t worry – that’s what the rest of this article is all about. This is an article about the biology and physiology of gut-level irresistible attraction and exactly what it looks like.
So let’s look into what’s actually optimally attractive so you can turn even more heads and drop even more jaws than you already do.

What is Sexiness?

At this point it’s probably a good idea to point out that focusing even more on our physical appearance can lead us down a path to insecurity. Sometimes cultivating a more aesthetically enlightened eye can just make us more critical of ourselves.
Always keep in mind that most guys aren’t looking at women critically. Men tend to love how women look in general. That doesn’t matter much when it comes to our own perfectionism though. Some of the most gorgeous people out there cry themselves to sleep because they’re so critical of their own physical appearance. That’s not the goal. I would prefer if you had more than your tears to keep you company at night.
What we’re talking about here is coming at this from the other side of things. Hotness, at its roots, is health and virility displayed in a very obvious and nearly impossible to fake way. In fact, this is arguably why we even value physical attractiveness in the first place. Sexiness is conspicuous health.
Exercise and nutrition doesn’t just affect how strong, lean and toned we look. That’s the positive change we see on the outside, yes, but that’s just the very tip of the iceberg. Leading a healthy lifestyle and lookin’ like da bomb also affects our longevity, mood, willpower, energy levels and all of our organs – including our brains. This is why we all intuitively assume that the cover of the book gives us clues about what’s inside.
For example, regardless of your race, healthy people’s skin looks a little different. A higher intake of vitamins and minerals (good nutrition habits), higher levels of oxygenated blood (good exercise habits) and a healthy amount of melanin (exercise, nutrition and sunlight) will turn your skin redder and yellower, giving you a healthier “glow”. It will probably go a long way to clearing up acne and improving your complexion too, but even just that ever so slightly different colouring subconsciously looks really damn hot to others. (study, study)
So, whether you’re interested in becoming the most undeniably beautiful babe on the block or you’re looking to become a smarter, healthier, stronger and more vibrant version of yourself on the inside, the methods are the same. This isn’t a makeup tutorial – the kind of physical attraction we’re talking about isn’t skin deep and, unfortunately, becoming drop dead gorgeous isn’t quite that simple.
This gets even more confusing when you start adding in all the mainstream media stuff.  The mainstream media ideals when it comes to female attractiveness are often dead wrong. Not wrong in the moralistic sense of the word wrong – that’s a whole other debate – I mean factually wrong. They’re incorrect.
I’m not saying that the mainstream media is dumb. They’re not. They’re actually very clever. It’s not that they’re missing the whole point of physical attractiveness, it’s just that they’ve got a different target market. They aren’t marketing female bodies to men, they’re marketing female bodies to women. Very different market. We’ll talk about that a little bit later, but super health won’t necessarily get you as far with women as it will with men, since women are often competing based on different physical traits that aren’t relevant to physical attractiveness.
Now, on to understanding (and achieving) the ultimately attractive head-turning jaw-droppingly-hot female physique … which just so happens to be the most healthy and wholesome physique imaginable too:

Body types and the ideal female weight.

First, let’s take a look at a few everyday body types. The vast majority of women fall somewhere on this spectrum:

None of these women look morbidly obese or like they’ve been in a starvation experiment or anything, and these aren’t unhealthy or unattractive body types – far from it. These women look good, attractive and healthy, they just don’t necessarily look remarkably healthy.
The funny thing is, they may actually be remarkably healthy. For example, the thin gal may have a slender bone structure, have a naturally small appetite, eat lots of nutritious foods, and really enjoy forms of exercise that make her smaller – jogging, yoga, aerobics, etc. She may be in amazing shape even though she doesn’t look that strong or curvaceous. 
Similarly, the naturally heavier gal may be a professional rugby player who exercises for several hours each day and eats a ton of nutritious food. She may be in excellent shape and excellent health, just with a higher body fat percentage.
… Or they may not be. The thin gal may be someone who doesn’t eat well enough to support muscle growth or someone who doesn’t exercise at all. Since muscle is so closely correlated with strength, she surely isn’t as strong as she could be.
And the plumper gal may be someone who doesn’t eat well, eats too much and doesn’t exercise. Since excess weight around the midsection is so closely correlated with health problems, if her lifestyle isn’t a healthy one she may be flirting with something like heart disease or diabetes.
These girls may be healthy, but they aren’t conspicuously healthy. Whether our instinctual judgements are fair or not, it’s hard to tell.
There’s nothing wrong with looking like a gal of average health who’ll live till she’s 81, but looking like the national average sure won’t get you noticed … especially when there are the rarer and more remarkable physiques of women who look like they’ll surely live to 120:

Obviously what size you’ll look and feel your best at varies depending on your body type and bone structure. Girls who are naturally thin are often able to build up enough muscle to look “slim & fit” very quickly, then could gradually work their way up to looking “strong & toned” … but it may be nearly impossible for them to rock the “strong & curvy” physique shown on the right. (example)
Similarly, someone who’s naturally voluptuous can usually become “strong & curvy” fairly quickly just by losing a bit of body fat … but may never be able to rock the very slim physique shown on the far left. (example)
With these three physiques, what men see is someone who only needs to make one trip with all of the grocery bags, someone who can easily muscle open up an old jar of honey with a sticky rim that’s keeping the damn lid glued on, someone who will make our best friends a little bit jealous, someone who can pick us up and carry us to the doctor if we get the flu, and someone who will surely pass all these impressive traits and abilities down to the next generation.
All of a sudden we’re struggling to get our hearts out of our stomachs, because that’s the kind of vibrant health and strength that we’re irresistibly drawn to.
It’s also rare enough that it stands out in a crowd. If head turning and jaw dropping is your goal, that’s important.
Most women will have a preference for the gal on the left. With lots of media exposure (a passion for fashion, say) you may have a preference for even thinner women than shown here. Men, on the other hand, more often love the look of fairly strong women, since visible strength makes people look even healthier and more capable. 
Why don’t male and female ideals line up? Just like men are taking the “muscle is masculine” thing to extreme levels, female fashion and pop culture are taking the “slenderness is feminine” thing to extreme levels. Women do dig men with some lean muscle mass, and men do dig women who are healthfully slender … but only within the realm of healthful normalcy.
Women who are fashion models (or who are exposed to photos of a lot of fashion models) often want to be fashion-model-thin. Similarly, men who are bodybuilders (or exposed to photos of a lot of bodybuilders) often want to be bodybuilder-big. This is a well known and well researched phenomenon. In more extreme cases, it can cause psychological issues, often causing steroid abuse in men and eating disorders in women. (study)

Is being incredibly thin or super enormously muscular impressive? Hell yes. These are people devoting an incredible amount of time and energy to their hobbies.
Is this the way to become maximally attractive? No. Male bodybuilders appeal to men and women who are into bodybuilding. Female fashion models appeal to other models and fashion designers and such. They don’t suffer for attention from the opposite sex – there are plenty of people who adore these exaggerated physiques – but they aren’t good at attracting the majority of the opposite sex.
So just like you probably want your lover to be strong and healthy but not ridiculously so, well, so do we. We prefer women of average healthy weight. Totally average BMI. No need to get your freak on, Missy Elliot, we prefer a pretty run of the mill bodyweight. (study)
Now if “average” healthy weight sounds a little too good to be true … well you have a point. We aren’t talking about looking like the average girl – she doesn’t eat well and she doesn’t exercise. We aren’t even talking about the average healthy girl, who may eat well, exercise, and weigh a healthy amount. What we’re talking about is someone who’s the same weight as your average healthy gal, but far more conspicuously healthy in appearance.
Not in an obsessive or unhealthy way, mind – we’re talking about women who are really thriving in their bodies here. They’re lively, energetic, vibrant, strong, fast – and they look it. Instead of subconsciously wondering about the possible ailments that may come about due to poor nutrition and exercise habits, we subconsciously assume that your ridiculous degree of hotness means total perfect health:

So by conspicuously healthy I mean the type of health that makes guys glide their sunglasses down to the bottom of their noses and say “damn … that girl’s heeeeeealthy*!” – that kind of healthy. And that kind of health is a pretty hard to achieve in a society where the scent of Cinnabon wafts through the air as you’re hustling from your bed to your car to your office chair. Life’s hard. #firstworldproblems

*Men often use slang words for impressively healthy like: hot, fine, sexy, foxy, smokin’, babeshow, etc.

Now I’m not saying that average bodies aren’t attractive – they are – what I’m saying is that they aren’t necessarily invading our minds with the uncontrollable urges that a fiery hot impressively healthy gal would. They just aren’t the bodies whose scents draw us compulsively in like a freshly baked Cinnabon. They might be amazing people, drawing us in like broccoli, because we know that’s where the wholesome amazingness is to be had … but you can totally get the best of all worlds and become a delicious fresh wild blueberry – impulsively delicious like a Cinnabon and totally wholesome on the inside and in the longterm.
(I’m sorry for the weird food references. The talk of Cinnabons kind of made me hungry.)
– Anyway, many cubicle latte babes are furiously struggling to become underweight. They’re working their asses off, not realizing that it’s usually better to work their asses on. It’s not even that they’re lazy – they’re often trying really damn hard! Like, harder than most men could possibly even imagine.
It’s just that if you’re a woman, well, when you look into exercise and nutrition all you tend to find is weight loss information. Even the muscle-building stuff seems to be aimed at people trying to lose weight overall.
What does this do? Well perpetually battling to become underweight doesn’t make you stronger. Leaner? Yes, well, sometimes, kind of. More often than not it makes you lighter – smaller.
They’re starting to look into the psychological side-effects of this mainstream desire to become physically smaller, and it’s a little scary. For example, it seems like eating less food is directly linked with submissive body language. Trying to diet down to a smaller body is not just reducing women’s physical strength, it’s possibly also reducing their social confidence? (study)
Moreover, since the average healthy weight is considered optimally attractive, this means that if you’re already of average weight (or below) then getting skinnier, smaller or littler won’t really get you any closer to becoming as attractive as you can be, and in fact it’s more likely to take you further away.
Oftentimes efforts to lose weight are combined with cardio, aerobics or yoga. All great forms of exercise with loads of health benefits, but combined with a calorie deficit and in absence of any heavy weightlifting … they’re atrocious when it comes to preserving muscular size, strength, power and speed. (study, study, study) So the underweight warriors often aren’t the toned kind of lean that made every man in the world fall in love with Jessica Biel when she buffed up for her role as a warrior:

That’s because Jessica Biel isn’t underweight. She’s not skinny. She’s not even “thin”. She’s fit as hell, but she’s also average weight in a visibly healthy way. And men don’t dig her bod’ because she has abs – she doesn’t have abs – they dig her bod’ because she has strong confident shoulders, glutes that can crack walnuts, and legs strong enough that she could probably pick up a runway model, put her on her shoulders and squat her for at least two reps. And she looks like she eats. She looks like she eats a whole helluva lot. You can’t build muscle like that by just crunching on carrots and munching on cupcakes.
And that’s why our jaws drop: she’s strong, healthy and vibrant. She doesn’t look like she spends her day nibbling on croissants in bed while browsing Facebook on her smartphone, she looks like she just beat her boyfriend in a decathlon and then had a wholesome feast to celebrate. And then some dessert.
(You don’t need to have guns as big as hers to be optimally attractive – it looks like she did a lot of focused arm and shoulder work to really create that distinctive look – but hey badass biceps certainly don’t hurt either.)
It’s not like being slender is unattractive – of course it isn’t – but many women still underrate the value of visible strength.

So … average healthy weight isn’t as common as you might think. But it’s actually not that hard to be remarkable either. We’re not talking about needing to train six times per week, or live on broccoli and chicken. We’re talking about genuinely living a healthy lifestyle in a way that will make you look like you genuinely live a healthy lifestyle. That takes cleverness, but it doesn’t take that much time, that much obsession, or that many sacrifices.
Many people take the other approach, actively trying to ignore this strength, fitness and nutrition stuff, telling themselves that their lifestyle just doesn’t have room for it, that it doesn’t matter, or that they’ll get to it later.* Those rationalizations also make it hard to stand out. That’s why impressively fit physiques are so rare.

Sometimes this can take up even more emotional space than actually leading a healthy lifestyle. Now that I go to the gym a couple times per week and regularly eat well, I find I have more energy and more time… and I never need to stress about health/aesthetics anymore.

Oh – and this isn’t the time to be cursing your genetics. Yes, rad genetics make this easier, but there are many attractive body weights, shapes and sizes (and goals). With that said, the sexiest bodies are nonetheless defined by several common characteristics.
So onward into the specifics:

The Ideal Woman’s Waist to Hip Ratio

Fit young boys and girls tend to be built like string beans. They’re just kind of narrow everywhere. But as soon as puberty hits men and women are born.
Men are shaped by testosterone. Strong healthy men with high testosterone are shaped like V’s – big broad shoulders, lean stomachs, small hips. Women tend to dig that stereotypically masculine shape because it’s indicative of good strength (broad muscular shoulders), good health (small lean waistline) and you can see it at a glance. It’s the quickest (a fraction of a second) and most accurate (most physical and mental health markers relate to muscle, hormones and fat) way to get an immediate snapshot of a guy’s overall health.
Same deal with women … except not at all. Women are shaped by estrogen, and strong healthy women with lots of estrogen are shaped like hourglasses – strong broad shoulders, lean waists and very strong hips. Just like you can size up a man’s health in a split second based on his body shape, the same is true with women. Strong women are wickedly muscular in the hips and glutes, indicating fearsome strength and bone structure, and lean through the waist, indicating healthy levels of body fat. (study)

Although, interestingly enough, some women are cheating the system, using estrogen to signal to their bodies to store fat in their butts and upper thighs instead of their stomachs. By moving their fat from their tummies to their tushes they’re enhancing their hotness via their fat stores. Kind of cool … kiiind of deceptive. You tricksters.
If at this point you’re thinking “but Shane – I’m a woman and I’m still a bean!” don’t fret – you may not actually have small hips. Yes, bone structure is probably a factor, but chances are that your hips also have undeveloped musculature that just isn’t poppin’ in all the right places. Most women these days can’t perform a proper hip hinge, resulting in muscles accumulating in their lower back and quads instead of in their butts, hips and hamstrings. While the bone structure of your hips won’t change, you can certainly build up strong curvaceous hips in the gym. (Tip for the non-genetically-gifted: curvaceous hips = strong muscular hips = hips that can lift, like, hundreds of pounds.)
Here’s a great gal, Reetta, with great genetics. She preferentially stores fat in her tush. Amazing. You can see what that looks like on the left. Over the course of a couple months she got a lot stronger and lost a bit of fat. You can see what a booty built out of muscle looks like on the right:


This works well for those who aren’t genetically gifted too. I have this friend who, once upon a time, was queen string bean. People would jokingly tease her about having no hips and no butt. (Funny joke, right? Nope.) Fast-forward a couple years and her nickname is Buns, because, well … her hips are pretty damn impressive. (She got a rugby scholarship – tons of heavy weightlifting and sprinting combined with eating tons of food at the all-you-can-eat college cafeteria.)
Anyway, what’s the ideal waist to hip ratio?!
The waist to hip ratio most correlated with health is 0.7 (study), and not surprisingly that’s what’s fairly universally considered the sexiest ratio, although it varies slightly between cultures. (To measure this you would take the circumference of your waist at the narrowest point and divide it by the circumference of your hips at their widest point.)