How to be attractive – wiggle your hips and take small steps

HOW a woman walks is as important as her body shape in making her attractive to others, a British study claims.

The study by Dr Ed Morrison, a University of Portsmouth evolutionary psychologist, is the first to compare women’s body movement to conventional measures of body shape attractiveness, including body mass index and a small waist compared with hips.

Dr Morrison said: “A combination of small waist, rounded hips and bottom, and a slim figure have long been reported to be important in women’s attractiveness, but it turns out the way a woman moves is as important.

“Most previous research into what makes a body attractive has relied on photographs, but in real life we usually see a potential mate moving.

“Research shows that we are more likely to find a woman attractive if she wiggles her hips and takes small steps. Because body shape preferences vary across cultures and through history, the study aimed to find out if you take away the face, what sort of clues would people use to gauge attractiveness. Motion capture allows us to isolate movement from body shape and compare the relative importance of the two.”

For the study, published in the journal Visual Cognition, 37 women with a

‘If you take away the face, what sort of clues would people use to gauge attractiveness?’

range of body types, and all wearing leggings and T-shirts, were filmed walking on a treadmill at a steady pace.

Reflective markers were placed on their bodies, and the footage was then stripped of all features except the points of light and cut to 10-second clips which were graded from one (very unattractive) to seven (very attractive). A second group was asked to rate the same women in photos and a third to rate film footage.

When participants could not see the women, but only the way their bodies moved, they tended to find the same women attractive as the other two groups – namely those with a body mass index of 19-23, along with a smaller waist to hip ratio. However, there was also a strong correlation between attractiveness and those who took small steps and wiggled their hips.

Dr Morrison said: “I’m not sure why a particular walking style is considered attractive but gait might be giving away important clues to a woman’s fitness and age – key components of reproductive health.” He added that further research was needed to find out whether the role of movement varied between cultures and whether attractiveness in motion could be faked.

He said: “It would be interesting to test if people can actively change their movement to attract or deter mates.”