Study Finds Women With Beautiful Faces Desire More Children
There's a reason why women having the most kids also tend to look the most feminine.
Think about Hannah Neeleman for a moment. Nine children, the youngest born just this past March, a working farm in Utah, and a former Juilliard ballet dancer with a face so pretty it’ll have anyone pause mid-scroll. Or Nara Smith, the model and content creator whose soft yet otherworldly features have made her one of the most recognizable faces on the internet — and who, still in her early twenties, is already a mother of four with no indication she plans to stop there. Outside the influencer sphere, Kimberly Van Der Beek is a mother of six and absolutely beautiful. You get the point, right? These women are stunning, and they all share a love for motherhood. As it turns out, there’s a science behind that: previous findings suggest that the thread running between them may be rooted in biology itself.
Researchers at the University of St Andrews published a study in the journal Hormones and Behavior that found women with more feminine facial features — think larger eyes, fuller lips, a smaller jaw, and nose — tend to want more children. The reason, they believe, comes down to one hormone: oestrogen. Oestrogen, the primary female sex hormone, does far more than most people realize. It plays a significant role in sculpting the face by inhibiting bone growth, which produces softer, more traditionally feminine features over time. The same hormone, the study suggests, also appears to influence how many children a woman envisions for herself.
To reach this conclusion, psychologists analyzed the oestrogen levels of 84 women between the ages of 18 and 21, cross-referencing urine samples with survey responses about each woman's ideal family size. The results were striking. Women who wanted larger families consistently showed higher oestrogen levels than those who preferred smaller ones. What made the finding particularly notable was that earlier research had pointed to testosterone (not oestrogen) as the hormone most tied to maternal desire. This study turned that assumption on its head entirely.
Dr. Miriam Law Smith, one of the lead researchers on the project, described the results as genuinely surprising in their magnitude. "We know that oestrogen is strongly related to maternal behaviour in many other animal species, but to see such a large correlation in humans is astonishing," she said. "Of course, we're not saying that all maternal tendencies are related to oestrogen levels, because maternal tendencies are also shaped by our experiences, our background, our upbringing, and a whole host of social and cultural factors."
Feminine faces, shaped in part by higher oestrogen, have long been rated as more attractive by men across numerous studies.
No researcher is suggesting that a woman's cheekbones determine her destiny, or that hormones override the very real weight of personal choice, career, finances, partnership, and a hundred other things that shape a family. The study is careful to frame oestrogen as one thread in a much larger fabric. Still, the biological signal it found is genuinely difficult to dismiss.
There is also an evolutionary dimension to the findings that adds another layer entirely. Feminine faces, shaped in part by higher oestrogen, have long been rated as more attractive by men across numerous studies. The St Andrews team suggests this preference may not be arbitrary at all. Professor David Perrett, who heads the university's Perception Lab, noted that the research reveals strong hormonal effects in young adults, and raised the question of how both hormone levels and the desire for children might shift as women age, particularly given that many women today don't begin their families until their thirties.
Dr. Law Smith explained, "In terms of evolution, if a woman's facial appearance signals aspects of maternal personality, as well as underlying fertility as we have previously shown, then what men find attractive could ultimately influence the size of the resulting family."
Honestly, the women who get the most grief online for wanting a bunch of kids and staying home tend to also be the ones you genuinely cannot stop staring at. Nara Smith has four children under the age of three and looks like she was carved out of marble. Hannah Neeleman just had her ninth baby and still looks like a beauty queen. Everyone will say this is just a coincidence. According to the University of St Andrews, probably not.