Although a lot of fashion magazines still encourage the idea that stick-like figures are beautiful, researchers insist that what attracts men the most is an hour glass figure. Compared to models that look like underfed adolescent boys with silicon-filled chests, women who have waists narrower than their hips are still more attractive to men. This was found out by a father and daughter psychological research team from the University of Texas.

Professor Devendra Singh and his daughter Adrian Singh analyzed thousands of examples of literature to find references of what men find attractive in women's bodies. Throughout the centuries, men always seem to prefer a woman's body with a low waist-to-hip ratio; women with a narrow waist compared to their hips.

Professor Singh believes this is so because such a shape in women suggest the abundance of the hormone estrogen, which is also associated with fertility. Since humans are genetically programmed to seek out the survival of their kind and the improvement of the gene pool, they're also genetically programmed to seek out beauty, because beauty is a suggestion of health. Good health, in turn, translates to better chances of species survival.

Men from all sorts of cultures all like women with slender hips. Thus, small hips could be considered the core of feminine beauty that transcends ethnic-morphological differences.