Facial attractiveness has been related to health in both men and women. Certain psychological, physiological, and secondary sex characteristics have been used as accurate markers of hormonal and developmental health. The main objective of this study was to investigate the capacity of women to select males of high reproductive quality based on their facial attractiveness. A total of 66 males were included in the study. Each of them provides a semen sample, and frontal and lateral photographs were taken. Semen analysis was made according to standard WHO (1999) guidelines for morphology, motility, and concentration. Moreover, a Sperm Index (SI) was calculated as the principal component of these parameters. In Study 1, 66 women rated the attractiveness, as a possible permanent couple, of pictures of all 66 men. In Study 2, the pictures of a subset of 12 males were randomly selected from three semen quality subgroups (terciles named good, normal, and bad, according to the value of the SI). These 12 pictures were rated on attractiveness by two independent sets of women (N=88 and N=76). Facial attractiveness ratings were significantly (P<.05) and positively correlated with sperm morphology, motility, and SI, but not with concentration, for all the women sets.
Judgments of facial attractiveness appear to be reliably associated with mate choice Chen et al., 1997, Rhodes et al., 1998, Thornhill & Gangestad, 1996 and Thornhill & Gangestad, 1999a, but what such judgments reveal about the phenotypic quality of the person is not fully elucidated. Certain aspects of facial attractiveness, such as symmetry and proportions Magro, 1999, Perrett et al., 1998 and Perrett et al., 1994, may be reliably correlated with health Cunningham, 1986, Kalick et al., 1998, Shackelford & Larsen, 1997 and Shackelford & Larsen, 1999. If what is deemed attractive about a male's face is an honest signal of phenotypic quality, one might anticipate that facial attractiveness judgments would be correlated with semen quality Barber, 1995, Gangestad, 1993, Grammer & Thornhill, 1994 and Pawlowski et al., 2000. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether women's judgements of the attractiveness of men, based on photographs of faces, would be correlated with the quality of the men's semen, according to standard quality indices of morphology, motility, and concentration.
