Attractiveness Components

I was pondering the different ways people can be viewed as attractive, and decided to systematize it. I am considering only static images of a neutral appearance, so no personality cues are incoporated. Using evolutionary pressures as a guide, I came up with the following four:

• desire to protect children
• desire for general health
• desire for the gender we are sexually attracted to
• desire for peak fecundity

The first component evinces itself in what I refer to as "cuteness". It can sometimes be at odds with the last measure, depending on the one making the judgement, giving rise to the "cute but not sexy" phenomena. The second is the typical beauty measures that we hear so much about: symmetry, proportion, height, clear skin, etc. The third is simply how much your appearance contains gender cues. Note that how this is interpreted by the viewer is what matters, so it says nothing of your absolute attractiveness in its own right. A good example of someone who varies from their stereotypical gender appearance but is still very attractive would be Katharine Hepburn, who has often been referred to as a "handsome" woman. The last is straightforward, mostly being about not being too old or too young, although it can overlap the second to some extent depending on how you frame the two.

The way this could be used in practice would be to have users rate many images whose components have been determined for overall attractiveness. Standard recommendation system techniques could then be used to infer the value each user places on each component, and should then allow estimating the rating of new photos once they've had their components rated. You could omit the requirement that images have their components directly determined, inferring them as well, but that would result in far slower convergence for newly added images.