Seems like every other day there is a new article or survey or study done which purports to prove beyond any reasonable doubt which group of women is the most attractive. Well, the Brits have thrown their hat into the ring to figure who, really, is the best looking. A study done in the UK says that mixed-race people are the most attractive of all.

Researcher Dr Michael Lewis and his colleagues from Cardiff University’s School of Psychology carried out the largest study of its kind to determine which group of people is deemed the most attractive to the British population. The researchers collected a random sample of 1,205 black, white, and mixed-race faces from Facebook communities, including ‘mixed race and proud’ and Cornwall-based. Each face was then rated for their perceived attractiveness to others on a scale of one to 10 by 40 female students.

Overall, there was a 55 per cent chance that mixed-race faces were perceived as being more attractive than either black or white faces.

But the ‘extremely attractive’ ratings were dominated by mixed race faces, who made up one in 10 of them.

This is a much greater proportion than would be expected based on their representation in British society of around three per cent, said Dr Lewis.

The article, “Brits believe mixed-race people are the ‘most attractive and successful'”, provides a few clues as to why mixed-race people were voted most attractive. Dr. Lewis states that people are drawn to “average” faces, and thus a face that has features from several ethnic groups is more likely to be closer to the average face than a face from a person of unmixed heritage. The Darwinian explanation is that people of mixed heritage are thought of as being more genetically “fit” than either of their parents–and “genetic fitness” is deemed to be linked to cues of physical attractiveness in the minds of the population.

It is interesting to note that racially speaking, the UK is overwhelmingly white at approximately 90% of the population. Black people and mixed-race individuals make up only a few percentage points of the population.

Thus, this study would have to mean that white people thought mixed-race individuals were more attractive than white people, so I don’t think racism was the reason why mixed-race folks won out. (My assumption is that racist people would not say mixed people look better than unmixed people.)

Whatever the cause of these results, I think it is important to remember that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You don’t have to be deemed attractive to a majority of people taking part in a survey done in a college psychology laboratory; you just have to be attractive to the one person you are in a relationship with.