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Despite being a generally barren field, Evo-psych has long been coming up with certain constants for defining beauty in all cultures. Some of them are symmetry, clearness of skin and tone, seperated eyes (instead of the eyes being close together), a waist to hip ratio for women and a shoulder to hip ratio for men and obviously youth. For women, fair skin within the population median is valued across all cultures but ours (which is peculiar in terms of modern human history) just like height is valued for men (again, not a constant, but occurs fairly often).

So these are the facts that may argue against the "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" view but if one looks more closely at it, one fails to see what is wrong with that particular view at all. Most of what we consider beauty is the averaging of features among the human population to arrive at the mean, a process to eliminate unwanted genetic defects. If human features consisted of the nose to be like a elephant's trunk, it would be distasteful aesthetically to us now but would be completely normal and considered beautiful in this hypothethical human population (where these hyp. humans adore the average blue nose). This is not to say that they have not been pressures due to sexual selection - in fact the recent differentiation in the features of Asians and Europeans is due to sexual selection. Epicanthic folds, black hair and fair skin were strongly selected in China, Japan and Korea while blonde hair and blue eyes were strongly selected for in Northern Europe (For example, the appearance of Asians was more heterogenous back in the time and some heterogenous looks can still be found in the outer regions of china - with combinations of blonde hair and epicanthic folds so prominent in one northern province that a geographical study wrongly stated that Romans have passed that particular place.) Fair skin was selected in both European and Asian contexts because of sexual selection in two very different ways and in two different part of the genomes.

The point being that the science of beauty is still an ongoing exercise and reveals a lot about the preference of humans. Beauty can be modified (after all, wearing white wigs was once a rage and now it is less so) but some features are constant overall in many cultures. I will continue this post tomorrow.