“Looks and Longevity: Do Prettier People Live Longer?”, 2024-08 ():
Little is known about the association between facial attractiveness and longevity.
We analyze how attractiveness based on yearbook pictures is linked to longevity.
We find that the least attractive 1⁄6th had a statistically-significantly higher hazard of mortality.
The least attractive 1⁄6th of women lived almost 2 years less than others at 20.
The least attractive 1⁄6th of men lived almost 1 years less than others at 20.
Social scientists have given relatively scant attention to the association between attractiveness and longevity. But attractiveness may convey underlying health, and it systematically structures critical social stratification processes.
We evaluated these issues using the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS, n = 8,386), a survey of Wisconsin high school graduates from 1957 which provided large samples of women and men observed until their death (or through their early 80s). In doing so, we used a meticulously constructed measure of facial attractiveness based on the independent ratings of high-school yearbook photographs. We used linked death information from the National Death Index-plus through 2022 and Cox proportional hazard models as well as standard life-table techniques.
We found that the least attractive rated sextile of the sample had statistically-significantly higher hazards of mortality (HR: 1.168, p < 0.01) compared to the middle rated 4 sextiles of attractiveness. This finding remained robust to the inclusion of covariates describing high-school achievement, intelligence, family background, earnings as adults, as well as mental and physical health in middle adulthood. We also found that different specifications of the attractiveness measure consistently indicated no statistically-significant differences in the mortality hazard between highly attractive and average-looking people.
Using life-table techniques, we next illustrated that among women in the least attractive sextile, at age 20 their life expectancy was nearly 2 years less than others’; among men in the least attractive sextile, it was nearly 1 year less at age 20.
[Keywords: attractiveness, longevity, gender, life expectancy]