The Universality of Attractiveness
Studies across cultures with varying levels of media exposure find broad agreement on facial attractiveness ratings for certain extreme cases, very symmetric faces are consistently rated more attractive; composites of many faces (mathematical average faces) are consistently rated higher than most individual faces. These findings support some cross-cultural universality in the attractiveness response.
However, cross-cultural agreement is modest for faces in the middle of the attractiveness distribution, and some features that predict attractiveness within one cultural context are neutral or negative in others. The universality is partial, not complete.
Average Faces Are More Attractive
The finding that composite (average) faces are more attractive than most individuals in the composite was first documented by Francis Galton in 1883 and has been replicated many times since. The current explanation is partly pathogen-resistance signalling: an average face configuration indicates an absence of genetic mutations that would cause deviation from the population mean.
This averageness effect has an important implication for face recognition: the celebrities who are most commonly matched (whose embeddings are closest to the population mean) may also tend to be among the most conventionally attractive celebrities in the database. The embedding space and the attractiveness space share some geometry without being identical.