Stress Is Neither Sexy nor Appealing

Researchers photographed 52 ‘good-looking’ Latvian women with an average age of 20, then vaccinated each for hepatitis B and measured how many antibodies they produced as a result. However, they also found that cortisol levels were also higher.

A new study confirms the fact that stressed out women are not attractive to men.
The study, done in Finland,  found that women with higher cortisol levels were considered less attractive than those with lower levels. Bottom line: stress plays a more important role is attractiveness than the researchers ever thought. In fact, the results came as a surprise… the study was meant to correlate immunity with attractiveness but then things went awry.

The research team then asked 18 heterosexual male undergraduates to rate the women on their attractiveness and found that higher cortisol levels in the women correlated with how attractive the men found them.

The study also found a link between how much fat each women carried and how attractive they were considered. Too high or low amounts of body fat reduced the women’s attractiveness. In other words, those who were too thin were regarded as just as unattractive as those were seen as too fat.

Dr Markus Rantala speculated that instead low levels of cortisol could signal health in the female face.

“This would be consistent with many studies in humans that have found stress has strong negative effect on health, including immune function, heart disease and susceptibility to cancer, etc…” he said.

Rantala added that an alternative explanation for the findings is that facial attractiveness indicates reproductive potential which is mediated partly by stress hormones. In fact, past research has shown that stress interferes with fertility.

NOTE: A 2010 study showed that when men in the company of a beautiful woman had higher levels of cortisol, especially when left alone for five minutes. And if the men thought the women were out of their league, so to speak, cortisol levels soared. Ahhh… the tension caused by being too close to beauty.

And yes, this is yet another reason to control stress by balancing cortisol output with things like meditation, yoga, exercise, deep breathing and Sanyx Stress Mitigating Compound.