This is beauty at its most skin deep

It is rather a trite research: asking volunteers to rate pictures of 59 young women aged 19 to 25 for attractiveness, health and femininity. But the overly curious among the researchers at the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland compared the results to an analysis of the photographed women's levels of estrogen.

And so they found that those with high counts of the sex hormone were judged to be prettier by both male and female participants. Attractive bone structure and smooth skin were found to correspond to high levels of the hormone.

Simply put: more estrogen present in the body could mean more attention of the opposite sex. Scientists can easily back that up because estrogen does have an impact on a girl's appearance during puberty, particularly on bone growth and skin texture. And scratching the evolutionary terms, it makes sense for men to favor feminine, fertile women. "Our findings could explain why men universally seem to prefer feminine women's faces," says a psychologist who led the study.

But look again -- A woman's fertility is as plain as the nose on her face -- or more particularly her cheekbones, chin and skin, thus on women wearing make-up, the researchers are harping that it’s a totally different story.

The researchers are clueless on the relationship between perceived appearance and estrogen in the study's responses to women wearing make-up, suggesting cosmetics could be hiding fertility cues.