Traits you think men find attractive, but they don’t

You can never be too rich or too thin, as the old adage goes. And given that the diet industry is worth $66.3 billion, according to Time, a lot of folks believe that, and they are willing to spend whatever it takes to slim down. So all men must want their ladies to be as skinny as possible, right?

Well, as it turns out, that’s not really the case, according to a theory by Professor Devendra Singh of the University of Texas that The Independent reported on in 1994. The study, which examined how male and female bodies store fat, found that there’s one thing that’s the most reliable indicator of what men find attractive: a waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) of between .67 and .8.

Singh and her colleagues noted in an 2010 article for Evolution and Human Behavior that body mass index, or BMI, wasn’t a big influence for men regarding female attractiveness. So no matter what your BMI is, whether it’s low or high, if you have that magical, low waist-to-hip ratio, men are more likely to find you smoking hot.