The attractive nose

You are an individual, right? You are captain of your fate and controller of your destiny? To a degree that is true but to another, larger degree, it isn’t. Undoubtedly your choices shape your life experience but there are also deep, unconscious forces that swirl within you and without you down the corridors of time. In fact, all of us are chin-deep in a gene pool that stretches back into human evolution, and should you be too sanguine about the purity of that pool, we now know that more than a few Neanderthals took a dip in those pleasant human waters. Every day we all make judgements about the world around us based on what our forebears experienced. This has been beautifully, albeit unromantically, illustrated in a new study of attractive men.

The study involved men and women who were measured for height, weight, waist circumference, and hip circumference. The subjects then had swabs taken from their throats and nose to test for six different potentially disease causing bacteria.

The results showed no pattern for the females in the study. However, for men a definite pattern did exist. Men with a higher Body Mass Index (BMI) had significantly more disease causing bacteria in their nose than slimmer men with a lower BMI.

Traditionally, slimmer men are regarded as more attractive so the theory here is that part of what has driven us over the millennia to regard slimmer men as more attractive is an unconscious, primal knowledge that their nose is less bacterial than the nostrils of heavier men which are brimming over with bugs. Those bugs of course dispose the man to illness and attraction, attractiveness, and Beauty are all about recognising from external body signs who is a healthy candidate for reproduction.

As the saying goes, “beauty is in the nose of the beholder”.