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Comment by Supermancho | Hacker News Reader

> The common optimistic retort is that beauty is indeed a social construct and that we have the capability of shedding ourselves of the instinct favouring conventionally beautiful people.

The number of attractive ugly people I have met in my life, is under 10, but not 0. Some of it was personality, some of it was an intangible/nonverbal bond. I've had a LTR with more than one of them.

I ended up marrying someone who was both physically attractive (overall) and had a compatible personality. This is not the same thing as having an overwhelmingly attractive personality.

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I think there is a "social construct" aspect of beauty, typically a variation on very skinny women, maybe plus big breasts. Those are basically what as a young man (and probably woman, I'm a man) you are conditioned to be interested in. And I've seen some guys basically parrot that. But for me and lots of men I talk to, there is, in my view, an instinctive view of attractiveness, basically a combination of health and good nature, or more simply curvy and smiling. I don't think that's a "social construct" in the way that term gets used, I think that's evolution.

Thinking about this reminded me about how Kirstie Allsop (a British TV presenter that would not be considered a traditional model) beat out lots of models in a world sexiest women ranking, for, in my opinion, exactly the reason I describe.

https://www.marieclaire.co.uk/news/celebrity-news/kirstie-al...

I think there is some truth in that there is some amount of "social construct" aspect, rather than being intentionally conditioned, that is a form of the "mimetic desire" Thiel always talks about, where you subconsciously want what others want. But where I disagree is that "skinny women big breasts" is an outdated archetype, from about the 80s to mid aughts (2000-2010). There's still the same mimetic desire on beauty that wades into unhealthy territory. "Curvy" is actually quite en vogue and on the extremes, there are many women getting elective plastic surgeries and injections on their lips, butts, and elsewhere, much moreso than the previous archetype. That used to be quite taboo, nowadays it's much less so. And as sure as the sun sets, there will still be ever changing shifts in mimetic desire of beauty among the next generations, just as older men still might favor the "skinny big breasts" archetype today.

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