It's official: Narrow waists are beautiful
January 10, 2007 
Throughout history, small and narrow waists have been regarded as a sign of feminine beauty, researchers now claim, confirming what corset-wearers have known all along.
According to scientists writing in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, the waist is one of the features of women's bodies most commonly referred to in literature, and of the 66 romantic or beautiful descriptions of waists found, every one described the waist as slim or small.
This was found to be the case in old English literature, as well as Indian and Chinese poetry, and remains attractive in modern writing today.
Commenting on the findings, the researchers argue that they offer a "window into human nature", showing that the beauty of a slim waist is a biological truth, not just a cultural one.
"The finding that the writers describe a small waist as beautiful suggests instead that this body part – a known marker of health and fertility – is a core feature of feminine beauty that transcends ethnic-morphological differences and cultures," they write.
"Our study suggests that in spite of variation in the description of beauty, the marker of health and fertility – a small waist – has always been an invariant symbol of feminine beauty."
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