Author: Irene Reppa, Assistant Professor, Psychology, Swansea University

Some people assume that there’s a type of beauty that everyone can agree on. But did early humans really admire slender bodies the way we do today? After all, fashions come and go – there’s been plenty of fads throughout history that we find hard to understand today. The UK’s deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, recently suggested “beautiful” needs to be removed from the government’s housing policy on the grounds it is too subjective. She said in an interview that “beautiful means nothing really, it means one thing to one person and another thing to another”. She isn’t alone. Many…