Women prettier than their mothers

JOHN BISSET/Timaru Herald

GORGEOUS GIRLS: Timaru mother Jenna Colina and daughter Keira Doran, 2, make sure they never leave the house without some lippy on.

There is now scientific evidence to prove that women really are the fairer sex.

A study has shown that evolution is driving women to become more beautiful, while men remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors.

Beautiful women also have more children than their plainer counterparts and a higher proportion of those children are girls.

These daughters, once adult, also tend to be attractive and so the pattern continues leading to women becoming steadily more beautiful over the generations.

Timaru mother Jenna Colina said perhaps the research showed that mothers were spending more time on themselves than they once did. The 25-year-old takes care of her appearance and keeps healthy by going to the gym.

She said even when busy, it was still important to make time for yourself. "You're not just a mum, you're still a person. On busy days you might not get a chance to put make-up on, but you can always put on some lip gloss before you duck out."

In the study, University of Helsinki researcher Markus Jokela used United States data in which 1244 women and 997 men were followed through four decades.

Their attractiveness was assessed from photographs taken during the study, which also recorded how many children they had.

He found attractive women had 16 per cent more children, and beautiful people were 36 per cent more likely to have a daughter than a son as their firstborn child.

The study found the beauty gap between men and women was also continuing to grow, with women becoming more attractive than men.

Psychologists believed this was because women were making more of an effort with their looks, and had more resources to do so such as more affordable beauty products and clothes that accentuate their best features.

- © Fairfax NZ News