Taller people have generally been perceived to be more attractive; and now researchers have discovered that the average Polish woman (about 5’4″ tall, with an inside leg measurement of 29″) would need longer 30.5″ legs in order to reach perfection.

That’s the conclusion of Polish Psychologists Boguslaw Pawlowski and Piotr Sorokowski at the University of Wroclaw, who wanted to investigate whether relative leg lengths affected such perceptions.

They asked 218 male and female volunteers to rank the attractiveness of seven male and seven female subjects from digitally altered images, which had been changed so that they were all the same height but with leg lengths that varied between 5, 10 or 15 percent from the Polish national average.

The team found that regardless of the volunteers own body shape and leg length, the most attractive legs for both men and women were judged to be those which were five per cent longer than average, followed by both normal-length legs and ones that were ten per cent longer than the norm. Surprisingly, legs fifteen percent longer than normal were not considered attractive.

Dr Boguslaw Pawlowski then confused the issue, by claiming “Long legs are signalling health”.

So, why then were really long legs considered less attractive than average legs?

He went on to point out that short legs are associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and type II diabetes in both sexes. And also higher triglyceride levels (linked to atherosclerosis, heart disease and strokes) as well as insulin resistance in men.

Although the study, reported in New Scientist, only looked at Polish people, Dr Pawlowski suspects each culture would prefer leg lengths slightly longer than the community norm.

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Posted by Jonathan in Psychology, Sociobiology

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