They Went Up To An Upper Room

Photographs of exceptionally beautiful women from the 1800s or early 1900s, or nude/erotic paintings from before then, strike most people are being drab and unattractive. Given the stability and cross-cultural consistency of beauty ratings (Langlois et al 2000), it seems unlikely that it is merely a matter of shifting norms or preferences or fashion but represents a real absolute gain in attractiveness. What is going on?

Has cosmetics and hairdressing really advanced that much or should we look at explanations like vastly superior vaccines, elimination of childhood disease, superior nutrition, elimination of hard (especially agricultural) labor, poverty etc?

(Large gains in means would not be unprecedented: when we look at photos of children or people from those time periods, one common observation is how short, scrawny, and stunted they look – and indeed, as an objective fact about an accurately-measured cardinal measure with absolute values, they were short & scrawny, and things really have improved that much.)

If physical beauty is not zero-sum, how far can it go? Can we expect weird effects akin to the tails come apart or the Spearman effect where after sufficient baseline gains, beauty starts to diverge in orthogonal directions/specialized types?

Or might, like the Flynn effect and height, we already be experiencing a reversal due to the obesity crisis or other factors like mutation load and we have already seen Peak Beauty (at least for the average person, of course CGI/growing populations/cosmetic tech implies that models & actors will continue their evolution into superstimuli)?

*

Thanks to gwern for this one.