“Progress In Beauty”, 2016-08-25 (; backlinks; similar):
Physical beauty & attractiveness of the general population of men/women seems to have increased greatly in the past few centuries, judging by surviving art/photos, contemporary judgments, and objective criteria like missing teeth, likely due to economic/technological/medical/nutritional improvements, but less from cosmetic tricks. Beauty may, however, be in decline very recently as some of those trends reverse (eg. now too much food, not too little).
Is physical beauty, masculine or feminine, a negative-sum, zero-sum (positional) or positive good? And has beauty increased or decreased over time? Thinking over various anecdotes and examples and changes in public health and environmental factors like nutrition and infectious disease and dentistry, I speculate that physical attractiveness of men & women in the West is not purely positional & relative, but has increased in an absolute sense over the past few centuries (albeit possibly decreasing recently as a consequence of trends like obesity).