I have seen attractive couples with less attractive children and I was wondering how is that possible? Isn’t it the case that children should inherit their parents’ good looks?
Do attractive couples make attractive kids?
That is not always the case. It doesn’t matter if a couple is attractive or not as beauty is a mix of genetics and culture. In some cases, children could look more like their less attractive grandparents than their parents. According to a recent study (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16949101) that I’ve read, one heritable trait, which increases the reproductive success of daughters much more than that of sons, is physical attractiveness. This means that if attractive parents have more daughters and physical attractiveness is heritable, then women should gradually become more attractive than men. The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health confirmed that very attractive individuals are 26% less likely to have a son.
Of course, this question leaves a lot of room for discussions but sometimes quite the opposite happens – two attractive people can have less attractive children. This happens because the features that make a man attractive also make him look ‘masculine’. Obviously, if a woman inherited these traits, then she would be considered to have masculine traits. The opposite is true for women. Very feminine women have traits, that if passed to their son, they will make him look more feminine.
Ultimately, I think that attractiveness is also the result of having a healthy lifestyle, grooming, exercising, and most often – money.