Secret of attraction? It's all due to the wiggle

It is not simply how you look but how you flaunt it that is the secret of attraction, says a study published today.

Jennifer Lopez, Study reveals secret of attraction
Jennifer Lopez: knows how to flaunt it

A body of evidence has built up suggesting that a simple measurement, such as the waist-to-hip ratio, can predict how attractive a woman is. But a US team reports that an hourglass figure is not enough.

A curvaceous figure has to wiggle in the right way too - or swagger in the case of men - according to a series of experiments that show the science of romance is much more complicated than researchers had thought.

Dr Kerri Johnson, of New York University, and Dr Louis Tassinary, of Texas A & M University, asked people to rate the attractiveness of animations and videos of people as they walked.

Because they used shadow figures and animations where at first glance the sex was not obvious, the 370 people who assessed the figures had to make assumptions about the person's sex and masculinity or femininity. The researchers found that a person perceived as female was rated more attractive when moving in a feminine way, such as with a hip sway, or had feminine characteristics, such as a small waist-to-hip ratio.

A perceived male's attractiveness was rated higher when moving in a masculine way or had masculine characteristics such as a large waist-to-hip ratio.

Notable examples of curvaceous women with that seductive sway include Marilyn Monroe and the singers Beyoncé Knowles and Jennifer Lopez. The shoulders of rugged males can be seen swaggering in the case of any actor who has played an action hero, from Mel Gibson and Arnold Schwarzenegger to Daniel Craig.

Earlier work by Prof Devendra Singh and his daughter Adrian, from the University of Texas, suggested that lovestruck men had only a woman's waist-hip ratio in mind. But today's study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that attraction is more complex than curvy figures and lantern jaws alone.

"For centuries, people have tried to identify a magical cue that inspires the perception of beauty," said Dr Johnson.

"We might be better off understanding how a range of cues affects our basic social judgments."