Girls: This is why we're hot!!

Starting the new content and material in reproduction, females are not only incredibly complex beings emotionally, but also biologically. Specifically, their menstruation and ovulation cycle. Diving deeper from such an intrinsic mechanism occurring in the female body into more external aspects that result given their biology: attractiveness during ovulation. The big questions are: are women more attractive or appealing to the opposite sex during ovulation than in other stages of their cycle? And why or how could this be? 

Craig Roberts designed a study based on female facial attractiveness during the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle. Taking two pictures of the same women's face one during the follicular phase and the other during the luteal phase, with multiple different women for variety, allowed the study to be conducted by the voting of men and women on which they viewed to be the more attractive photo of that given women. The results concluded that although small, there was a difference in the votes of which face was more attractive, being the face that was in the follicular stage (Roberts, 2004).

Another study done by Kelly Gildersleevea, she tests the natural body odor and scent of women through the use of male participants and female subjects on whether or not their odor was different in separate stages of ovulation. The results were as she hypothesized: there were! And the men recorded to be more attracted to the high-fertility ovulating scent that a woman had in comparison to the low-fertility scent (Gildersleevea, 2011). 

Some rational and reasoning behind this could be due to evolutionary mechanisms that take place such as women preparing and attracting a man to mate and reproduce with which leads to an increase in her physical enticement to men through pupillary dilation, lip color and size, skin color and tone adjustments all through the increase of levels of estrogen during the follicular stages of the menstrual cycle. Of course more studies need to be done to research further into this occurrence and really narrow down what exactly is going on, what about the physical attraction makes a woman so appealing or what about her scent makes her more desirable. 

But, the overall message is clear and interesting- women, using your monthly cycle of pain can now be used as a monthly cycle of beauty… so bat those eyelashes and let the boys flock to you!

References:

A.Gildersleevea, K., G.Haseltona, M., M.Larsona, C., & G.Pillsworthb, E. (2011, November 23). Body odor attractiveness as a cue of impending ovulation in women: Evidence from a study using hormone-confirmed ovulation. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0018506X11002704?via=ihub.

Roberts S.C., Havlicek J., Flegr J., Hruskova M., Little A. C., Jones B. C., Perrett D. I., and Petrie M. Female facial attractiveness increases during the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle 271 Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B http://doi.org/10/1098/rsbl.2004.0174