I have a deep appreciation for beautiful things. Of course, one might not find what I found  beautiful. But for my taste, I love harmonization of different colors, usage of different textures, anything sparkling, flowers, and cursive writings. I am a huge fan of eye shadows, lipsticks, and blushes. I have always liked and been interested in clothes, purses, and 4-inch high heels. All these make me feel beautiful. Wearing the perfect outfit and having a flawless make up day with the perfect eyeliner, rosy cheeks and plump lips boost up my confidence. It turns out being beautiful not only influence one’s confidence level, but offspring sex ratio.

In his paper, Beautiful Parents Have More Daughters, Dr. Kanazawa concluded that more attractive women give birth to daughters than those less attractive. His data included a sample of 20,745 adolescents who were interviewed in 1994-1995 and then interviewed again in 2001-2002. From 20,745 of 18-28 respondents, 2,972 had at least one biological child. He observed the sex of the first child as a dependent variable and the parents’ physical attractiveness as an independent variable. This physical attractiveness was measured by interviewer after each home-interview, from scale of 1 to 5, 1 being very unattractive and 5 being very attractive. From this data, he observed the sex of the respondent’s first child.

He found that proportion of boys among the first child is substantially lower in “very attractive” category. The analysis further shows that “very attractive” woman are “about 26% less likely to have a son, even when controlling for the respondent’s education, income, race, sex, age at first sex, and the number of sex partners in the last 12 months.

Dr. Kanazawa further rationalizes his founding that this is because physical attractiveness is more beneficial to women. According to his book, Why Beautiful People Have More Daughter, he claims that males consider spouse’s attractiveness more for something long-term, whereas females are more attracted to physical appearance of males for something short-term. Although physical attractiveness is equally important factor for the both sexes, it contributes more for “women’s reproductive success than to men’s.” This is said because, according to him, women need to be beautiful to be attractive to men , to give birth to beautiful daughter, so this beautiful daughter can give birth to even more beautiful daughter. In this sense, Dr. Kanazawa predicts there will be more number of beautiful women after one generation to the other. Women are progressively getting beautiful.

However, in 2011, Dr Kanazawa published a research that titled “Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women.” When he was questioned, he could not provide any evidence to support his conclusion. However, he did defend himself saying it is possible that Black women tend to have more masculine features due to their above average level of testosterone.

I believe that someone’s beauty cannot be determined by science and scientific founding should not be rationalized. Preference and ideal of beauty has been changing throughout decades. Most scientific method of determining beauty might be through the Gold Proportion, found in phi.