Past research on what makes people sexy found that factors such as fertility and resistance to disease is what draws people to their partners so that the species can survive. A new study by scientists at Queens University Belfast studied these traits anew and found that they don’t matter on their own but how well the features of attractiveness fit together.

The conclusion:

Why do some people appear attractive to us while others don’t? Evolutionary psychology states that sexual attractiveness has evolved to assess the reproductive qualities of a potential mate. Past research in the field has identified a number of traits that can be linked directly to qualities such as immuno-competence, developmental stability, and fertility. The current study is motivated by the hypothesis that attractiveness is determined not just by individual, independent traits, but also by whether their pattern is internally consistent. Exploiting the domain of biological motion, we manipulated internal consistency between anthropometry and kinematics of a moving body. In two experiments, we varied internal consistency by using original point-light walkers (high internal consistency) and hybrid walkers, generated by combining anthropometric and kinematic data from different walkers (low internal consistency). As predicted, we found a significant link between internal consistency and sexual attractiveness, suggesting that internal consistency signals health and mate quality.

The scientists used light displays of 15 moving dots in two different experiments aimed at pinpointing people’s shapes and movements and found out that attractiveness depended on whether the movement and the shape matched each other.

When the scientists mixed the movements of one person with the sahep of another, the respondents did not find the subject appealing. Dr. Nikolaus Troje said that our visual system is a “lie detector” that perceives even the slightest inconsistencies and does not find these attractive.

The result of the study regarding what makes you sexually appealing found that it depends on whether the subject was being themselves.