Athletic Progress

Few would deny that Olympic athletes have, objectively, become much better over the past few centuries—the runners run far faster, the powerlifters lift far heavier weights, and so on, due to professionalization, better equipment, better training, larger populations to recruit from, and many other points of progress. Similarly, boxers and bodybuilders are objectively far more impressive than they were less than a century ago in the 1930s (thanks to ultra-cheap protein and gyms everywhere and drugs and improved training): who would bet a bent penny on boxing world champ John L. Sullivan, who toured the USA punching out challengers in seconds against a Mike Tyson, much less a MMA star? (Sullivan hardly even looks like he ‘lifts’—because he didn’t.) Rubik cube puzzle solvers have dropped solve times from minutes to seconds using an array of tricks & improvements (like literally lubricating the cubes for speed), and video game players or speedrunners have achieved similar improvements, and mountain climbers or cliff climbers make impossible climbs now, and all of these are quite objective and difficult to dispute.

Progress In Beauty

If all of these can improve so much, why not beauty? Surely physical attractiveness should benefit from many of the same things: more knowledge about physical fitness and diet, cheaper food and travel, better communications, the spread of ‘tricks’ (like lubing a Rubik’s cube for speed), a larger population to draw from, etc.

If it has, then there are many possible reasons. The 20^th century in particular saw major progress in nutrition (eg. iodization eliminating goiters & cretinism & stunting, which surely are not beautiful²), vaccinations eliminating harmful & disfiguring diseases like smallpox and increasing adult longevity due to less ‘scarring’³, an almost total shift from outdoors work to indoors work (bringing with it protection from the sun and the elements), delayed entry into the workforce, far less manual labor⁴, cheaper clothing and cosmetics (not to mention a radical expansion in the kinds of cosmetics available such as the creation from almost nothing of the plastic surgery industry—a class of technology that essentially could not exist at population-scale in a pre-anesthesia/antibiotics world), lower lifetime birth rates etc. Many of these changes happened during the 1920^–₄₀1960_66ya time window, in which iodization went nationwide, key vaccines like polio were rolled out or used to eradicate diseases in the USA, urbanization rates almost doubled, per capita GDP doubled, etc.

All of these could be expected to improve physical beauty, and we can see first-hand proof of how ‘aging’ life in poor countries can be when we look at photographs of women: for example, there is a famous photograph “Migrant Mother” from the Great Depression of a despairing worn-out woman with her children, who one might guess was in her 50s—she was 32. An interesting datapoint comes from American high school yearbooks (“A Century of Portraits: A Visual Historical Record of American High School Yearbooks”, Ginosar et al 2015); high school yearbooks are homogenous portraits that students prepare for, which haven’t changed much over time, cover most of the population then and now, offering a relatively controlled comparison, particularly using composite/average faces, and the differences in attractiveness over time is striking—it looks to me like attractiveness increased from ~1910 to ~1980 and has perhaps fallen towards ~2000s (where obesity is clearly taking a toll). The main argument of is that smiling has increased, but looking at them, I am convinced that the difference between the 1900_126ya average and, say, 1970_56ya, is not merely a matter of smiling, and of course, why did smiling or longer hair length become popular? ‘Photographic improvements’ aren’t an answer since cameras got better rapidly and were effectively instantaneous for most of that sample. Improved nutrition and overall health, and optometry & dentistry especially, or cost/quality improvements of soap & indoor plumbing, might have had something to do with that… (Possibly because they could—someone missing most of their teeth, or unable to grow more than scraggly clumps of hair, is not going to be so eager to smile or adopt long styles.)

Overseas, a striking example is provided by the before/after of the famous Afghan Girl: from the original photograph, one might guess at her 20s (she was 12), and when she was refound 17 years later at age 30, one might guess she was in her 60s from how haggard and worn her face is. Isabella Bird, traveling in impoverished central Japan in 1878_148ya, was struck in the mountains by the sight of the people: “The married women look as if they have never known youth, and their skin is apt to be like tanned leather. At Kayashima I asked the house-master’s wife, who looked about 50, how old she was (a polite question in Japan), and she replied 22—one of many similar surprises.”⁵ She compares them unfavorably to Ainu women, who “look cheerful, and even merry when they smile, and are not like the Japanese, prematurely old, partly perhaps because their houses are well ventilated, and the use of charcoal is unknown.” One can also see this phenomenon in other countries like Russia with jokes about how ‘devushkas’ turn into ‘babushkas’ overnight on their 30^th birthday.

In the 1400s, Lucrezia Borgia was famed for her beauty and blond hair, but the only from-life portrait Wikipedia can provide shows neither; her rival, Isabella d’Este, immediately strikes one as “distinctly plump” (and her love of Venetian ceruse likely did her skin no favors, cf. Elizabeth/Maria Coventry); Simonetta Vespucci, with a greater claim to blondeness & Italian beauty, died young and left a beautiful corpse admired as much in death as in life⁶—but even though we are warned that the ‘portraits’ of her may be misattributed & represent an ideal of feminine beauty who never existed, we might wish they had been further idealized. We are told in the 1500s Margaret of Valois was the “pearl of Valois” for her beauty as much as her wit, surpassing her sister Elisabeth of Valois (also considered highly attractive), such that she was “more divine than human, but she is made to damn and ruin men rather than to save them”; this mortal peril is difficult to see in the numerous flattering portraits that survive, as is the “springtime beauty” of Princess Henrietta of England. Or consider French revolutionary Aimée de Coigny, famed for her beauty and man-eating, who the aged Horace Walpole (no naif he) described as “much the prettiest Frenchwoman I ever beheld”; her portrait was painted ~age 28, and is unprepossessing⁷, as is the remarkable adventuress Camille du Gast, “once known as the most beautiful woman in Paris”. Similarly in the French revolutionary period, the future Empress Josephine learned to keep her mouth closed as much as possible, to avoid exposing her teeth (possibly decayed in childhood by cane sugar); a friend of the Bonapartes remarked rather unkindly in her memoirs that “Had she only possessed teeth, she would certainly have outvied nearly all the ladies of the Consular Court” and that “her teeth…were already frightfully decayed, but when her mouth was closed, she looked, especially at a little distance, both young and pretty”. In the 1800s, King Ludwig I of Bavaria collected a “Gallery of Beauties”, a collection of portrait paintings of the most beautiful women he could find regardless of station, ranging from an accountant or cobbler or pawnshop clerk’s daughter to his own daughter, including several mistresses famed for their beauty, such as Jane Digby (see also Venetia Digby) or Lola Montez; a similar 1600s gallery, the Windsor Beauties, depicts many mistresses of King Charles II (eg. Barbara Palmer, 1^st Duchess of Cleveland, “one of the most beautiful of the Royalist women”), and there is the somewhat later Hampton Court Beauties (King William III)—my own impression is that they are clearly trying towards beauty consistent with modern standards but don’t get too far, despite Ludwig casting a wide net.

Similarly, Mathilde Kschessinska was a Polish ballerina who became the mistress of Czar Nicholas II of Russia; several Russians (including the peculiar Natalia Poklonskaya) criticized a movie about it as so much scurrilious slander based on, among other claims, that she was too ugly. Probably the “Circassian beauties” would not fare well either, and the example of Marguerite Steinheil, famous for her affairs and accused of literally loving French President Félix Faure to death, is an ecouraging example for us all that beauty isn’t everything. (More difficult, but still thought-provoking, would be similar examples in East Asia where photography was available long before industrialization so we don’t have to go off portraits: how would the most famously beautiful Korean kisaeng entertainers compare to run-of-the-mill contemporary K-pop stars? Or similarly, geisha in Japan?)

I was struck watching They Shall Not Grow Old by how the carefully-restored video footage of WWI-era England revealed many of the drafted men—those who were not rejected for reasons of health—were stunted and short, with teeth already missing (perhaps because of—shades of The Road to Wigan Pier—all that jam on white bread we see them eating), and draftees reportedly gained “1 stone” of weight on average due to being fed real food & exercise (although still none would qualify for a fat men’s club). Even as late as 1968_58ya in England, 36% of the population aged >16yo were “edentulous” ie had no natural teeth left; this is not merely driven by the elderly, either, since 25–34yos average ~8%, and by the 35–44yo age bracket, the rate reaches ~20% (Gray et al 1970); this makes the occasional claim of total teeth extraction for dentures as birthday & wedding presents or that some urban legends (of “monsters with iron teeth”) stemmed from dentures not so implausible. (Needless to say, English dental health has improved drastically since, and things like “apple scoops” are no longer necessary. And thank goodness we no longer resort to arsenic as a painkiller!) In the US, salt iodization only came about sometime later as a result of draftees not fitting in their uniforms due to the prevalence of goiters (never mind the cretinism), with draftees often still malnourished well through to the Vietnam War (see McNamara’s Folly); France was little better, with travelers noting whole villages of retarded cretins⁸, where a quarter of young (relatively) healthy men were rejected by the military and many men were insane, hunchback, bow-legged, or club-footed due to conditions which were little kinder to young rural women either, who one contemporary called often, “a Venus [with] the face of an old monkey”.⁹ Sun exposure rapidly ages womens’ appearance; add in the effects of physical and child-bearing labor, malnutrition, childhood disease increasing underlying frailty, being married off and binding/cutting one’s hair, and so on, and a beautiful young woman must indeed have resembled a flower—blooming for but a season. Men were not exempt; I was unaware until recently that financier J. P. Morgan did not look like the usual portrait of him, and all official photographs of him had been edited (we sometimes forget this was possible pre-Photoshop!) to hide his nose, which had been badly deformed by a disease we no longer see (due to being easily treated by antibiotics).

Life expectancy increases appear to have relatively little to do with headline medical treatments like cancer, and more to do with public health measures like reductions in pandemics, with reductions in childhood illnesses predicting increases in adult life expectancy; and diseases like dementia have been in remarkable decline. All of this points to large improvements in overall “bodily integrity”: everything is more robust and better due to less accumulated damage from lifestyle, childhood infections, pollutants like indoor fires, increased protein consumption, disappearance of tobacco smoking (eg. Guyuron et al 2009), general medical progress (no smallpox or leprosy)… With all of these effects pushing the population mean up a lot, it seems likely that the most beautiful people to ever live walk the earth now.¹⁰

The aforementioned Jean Harlow herself furnishes an interesting example, as after long-running health problems such as weight gain/fatigue/paleness, she died aged 26 of kidney disease (now mostly treatable) which was probably the sequelae of a childhood infection by scarlet fever (while not vaccinable, scarlet fever is now curable & occurrence largely suppressed by antibiotics).

Hollywood actors have continued to gain since then: we can get an idea of the progress at the extremes by looking at photographs of actor attending major events, particularly the Oscars, and being photographed against the standardized backdrops under relatively consistent lighting chosen for visibility. This avoids confounds like changes in film makeup or color-grading fads or CGI advances or too-extensive editing or camera technology changes (high-end cameras have not changed as much as low-end cameras have), and actors who are aging poorly will self-select out, while participating actors are extremely incentivized to appear their best, helping ensure that the extremes are disproportionately represented; and because actors attend such events so frequently at known dates & ages, fans can put together time-lapse showing particular actors as they age or compare actors over history.

These sequences can show interesting things (like the wave of Hollywood weight loss triggered by semaglutide ~2022), and I am most struck by the large differences in actor appearance vs age over the past few decades: over a 40-year span, actors from the 1980s, say, often look at least a decade older than 2020s actors do. And some actors have shown peculiar staying power—Tom Cruise, for example. Such actors benefit from now-a huge arsenal of personal coaches, drugs & medical treatments (eg. minoxidil ~1996), the importation of steroids & bodybuilder culture, cosmetic surgery (eg. Botox, fillers), better air and the end of smoking, avoidance of sunlight, retinoids (eg. retinol for skin aging, c. 1980s?), etc. The prolongation of Hollywood careers has drawn commentary, and it’s intriguing that we seem to see career longevity elsewhere in places that used to physically burn out participants, like American football, and have also seen trends towards extremely intensive, expensive, and scientifically/technologically sophisticated care intended to minimize injury & maximize longevity as the best way to improve athletic performance.

So, all in all, I take these as real effects: the ceiling really has been raised, the best really are better, and we are not merely being misled by cherrypicking or clothing/makeup fashion.

Some objections come to mind:

• with an increasingly large population, the most extreme models and actresses will be much more beautiful than early on, similar to sports. The USA was a smaller population in 1900_126ya than in 2016, and Hollywood & advertising have likewise expanded enormously, in addition to recruiting globally. Early Hollywood starlets were big fish in small national pools. Or perhaps modern advertisements and media are increasingly manipulated with Photoshop.

  But then why does it also hold true when we compare photographs of ordinary people, and why would the artwork, whose artists were little constrained by reality, have been exceeded as well? And can we really say that the elimination of things like smallpox scarring makes no difference?

• beauty is purely relative

There are at least 2 possibilities for how beauty works:

1. beauty is (mostly) relative/ordinal and is perceived as relative: a beautiful person is merely someone above the average on some arbitrary cultural measurements which are caused by no important objective attributes like health or strength; in another group of people, the same person would be rated by the same raters as ugly rather than beautiful. Particularly good examples of the relativism include the centuries of tooth-blackening and eyebrow-plucking among the Japanese aristocracy, Chinese foot-binding, tanning vs white skin, gavage in Mauritania etc.

   Changes in beauty, therefore, indicate no gains to the possessors of beauty, cause no additional pleasure/displeasure in those around them (as they will perceive the same average level of beauty regardless), will vary wildly from culture to culture, and beauty itself is a harmful construct in that the biases in favor of beauty can disproportionately harm subgroups and in general causes wasteful arms races in time & money spent on tactics like cosmetics, clothing, or surgery, which leaves the group worse off.

2. beauty is (mostly) objective/cardinal and is perceived as objective: a beautiful person is above average on objective attributes like facial symmetry, long hair, smooth undiseased skin, height, energy & health, personality, intelligence etc. Hence, entire groups of people can increase or decrease in their average beauty, and ratings of individuals will not shift based on reference group.

   Changes in beauty, therefore, may be due to objective improvements or it may be due to cosmetics etc. However, since perceptions are not relative, people will enjoy more what they see, so the arms races may be worthwhile in the same way that any decoration or artwork is worthwhile—because it looks nicer. On the other hand, to the extent that beauty serves as an indicator for objective things, this may be harmful: for example, if beauty & reproductive fitness are to reduce genetic mutation load, use of cosmetics is harmful as it hides the harm being done by bad genes & prevents them from being purged.¹¹

If #1 is right, then there should be high levels of disagreement about whether a photograph of an individual is ugly or beautiful between raters (who will have been raised in different social groups and have different standards), higher still across ethnic groups, and almost total global disagreement across cultures; and beauty should correlate minimally with traits because social treatment has little effect on stable traits like height or health or intelligence or personality.

“Maxims or Myths of Beauty? A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review”, Langlois et al 2000, meta-analyzes a variety of studies, and on the first point, finds that ratings of beauty are remarkably consistent and actually increase with distance: within-culture, r = 0.9/.85; cross-ethnic, r = 0.88; cross-culture, r = 0.94. (Given the limits of such inventories, this might imply that agreement on beauty cross-culturally approaches identity.) Langlois et al 2000 also finds that more attractive adults are more employed, date & have sex more and are more socially skilled & extraverted, are in better mental & physical health, and are slightly more intelligent. Unsurprisingly, beliefs that the beautiful are treated better by other people also turn out to be true. (Given that sex did not strongly moderate the results, this suggests that either men pay too little attention to their appearances or women too much.) Combined with the other evidence for things like fluctuating symmetry, #1 can be rejected. (Theory #2 is also more consistent with my personal observations.)

The past is a foreign country, so it seems like a safe assumption that the beauty ratings of someone in, say, 1920_106ya would correlate r = 0.94 with ours. Then ratings will still be similar—eg someone rated at the 84^th percentile (+1SD) by us would on average be rated 82^nd percentile (+0.94SD) by them. So we would expect that the modern mean of beauty would be higher as long as it’s at least 0.06SDs higher, which is not much at all.

That would assume the difference is random, though, and not systematic: in the worst case, if that remaining 0.06 reflects a consistent cultural preference & fashion of the moment, then someone in 1920_106ya will rate higher all people from 1920_106ya, and someone from 2016 will rate higher all people from 2016. How large would this rating bonus have to be to produce an overall correlation of r = 0.94? The total variance is 0.94² + b² = 1, so a binary variable totally explaining the remaining variance must have the effect b = 0.342. So in the worst case, we would have to demonstrate an increase by our standards of +0.342SDs before we could be sure that people from 1920_106ya would agree there had been an increase. The implication of this increase is that our 50^th percentile would have to match their 63^rd percentile; or to put it another way, in random pairs, ~59.5% of modern people would have to be judged the more beautiful. I think this is a bar that could definitely be met, so even in the worst case, beauty has increased over time.

See Also

• Ordinary Life Improvements

External Links

• “The Golden Age of the Aging Actor” (see also athletics)

• “Did People Used To Look Older?”, Vsauce

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