Thirty Favorite Images from Dispelling Beauty Lies
Dispelling Beauty Lies was written to document the range and frequency of male tastes in feminine beauty, not to promote the author’s personal preferences. This should be obvious to clear-headed readers, because it always argues with data and logic, not opinionated assertion. Nevertheless, some offended critics insist otherwise. So I’ve produced this collection of my personal favorites to refute them in the simplest possible way.
If you enlist people to collect and share the images they truly find compelling, few will follow the assignment to the letter. Instead they'll select images that make them look good, and that impress potential mates. They'll feel an overwhelming, semi-conscious compulsion to censor anything that makes them look weird or vulgar or trashy, or that intimidates potential mates instead of impressing them.
As far as self-interest is concerned, they're not wrong. We win much more from seeming impressive than from being honest when we're not. Most people don't like the truth, don't care about the truth, and, of course, can't handle the truth either. Indirectly flattering them with our purported tastes brings social advantages. Plus, let's face it: some tastes really are unpalatably weird and gross, and while we know they exist, and may even be common, we still don't like to think about them. All this is why beauty lies are such a problem in the first place.
As the author of Dispelling Beauty Lies (which I strongly advise you to read before this irrelevant sub-page), I have more to lose than anyone in making an honest selection of my favorite images from the two-thousand or so included in the article. Those who can't handle the truth find they very much can handle hating its messengers, and love any excuse to bash me. Nor do they need an excuse. They'll call me all sorts of offensive names, whether they have the slightest basis in reality or not (I am a genuine starving artist, but for some reason they never bring this up). If I include something weird in my selection, they'll latch onto it as confirmation that logic doesn't work and 2+2 don't make 4 when I'm the one doing the adding. After all, nothing in the article is argued from my opinion, so they can only make their ad hominems work by tricking their listeners along these lines. Stupid, of course, but people are.
On the other hand, as an aesthete and analyst, I have more to gain as well. What would happen if I made a serious effort to choose my real favorites, in a completely uncensored way? How consistent would they be? When would my choices agree with my theories about feminine beauty, and when wouldn't they? When would they be majority tastes, and when minority? In the interest of answering these questions, I made my best effort to select my favorite images accurately, regardless of whatever blowback might follow. You can see them at the bottom of this page.
The result is a collection that differs from the common male taste in quite a few ways. It's rather high in “yin” (a minority taste), with a recurring color palette of black and white accented in small amounts of red and gold (not a beauty error, but a minority taste when taken to this extent), and a near absence of pink, which seems to have been replaced with light blue (unusual). Quiet, mysterious, sensitive, and moody gazes predominate (also a minority taste), while the “cute factor” is somewhat low. Hips are wider than the norm, but waists aren't quite as small as the norm. Butts tend to fall in the upper quartile of preferences fairly often, and the overall emphasis on curves is modestly above the average, though the body-types selected aren't perfectly consistent, and other factors clearly influence the final decision. The fairly popular top-heavy "skinny-hot" figure doesn't make a single appearance. Faces are heart-shaped, which is a common taste, though perhaps given a little extra emphasis here. There's also one example of a rare taste: I perceive an earthy eroticism in the unshaven woman, but most people in the 21st-century would strongly disagree.
A few of my choices are weird or vulgar and don't seem to match the rest very well. But in the end, this degree of inconsistency isn't really so strange. We all have a range of tastes—rather like a mountain range, with a few peaks that stand well above the rest, but many scattered, smaller peaks too, which don't necessarily form an ordered whole. An early version of this page, where I selected nine instead of thirty, was much narrower in aesthetic scope, and doubled down on the monochromatic tendency while excluding the weird and quirky images. Those original choices remain my most favorite. But over time it occurred to me that this short list made me seem narrower and simpler than I, or anyone, really was. So I resolved to expand it until I was forced to explore beyond the central Everest and coax those smaller and more distant peaks out of the clouds and into view.
I feel that revealing this breadth is for the best. Life is large, and in its full course there's not only room, but need for some variety and contradiction. In that light we should appreciate the inconsistency of our personal topography rather than being uncomfortable with it.
Perhaps what I dislike will interest you as well. In fact, I find many of the images men submitted for the “beauty and hotness” section unappealing. Too many to list. Yes, I included them in the article anyway. I don't like either of the top scorers in my long series of social-media polls. I especially dislike this model, very highly rated by men. This model occurs perhaps more frequently in the article than any other, but didn't make my favorites list, and I'm a great deal less keen on this common AI-girl type and this popular model. All the models I've just complained about appear multiple times in the article, because, well, it's not about me. That said, I don't understand the somewhat widespread minority taste for boy-butts on girls at all, and while I've reported on it accurately, I may have underrepresented it visually by consequence. I suppose none of us are completely free from sin.
Altogether this selection offers good evidence that Dispelling Beauty Lies is not, as some critics argue, just an elaborate attempt to make my own personal tastes seem universal, despite the fact that my favorite models appear more frequently than they ought to. That's a quirk of the article I'm afraid you'll have to tolerate. Though hardly bizarre, mine qualify as minority tastes in several meaningful respects, and don't perfectly match my generic advice, which is intended to help the typical woman appeal to the typical man. Attentive readers will have noticed that I do advise women to cater to minority tastes when they're well positioned to exploit them. And, as you can see, I hope they take that advice seriously.
The next time my critics are keen to personally denigrate the author of their least-favorite beauty tips, I encourage them to link to this page of favorites and say their worst rather than making up perverse nonsense out of whole cloth. And as for my friendlier readers, I hope my own example will encourage you to be more honest, bold, and thoughtful, so that all of us can benefit from improving public understanding of feminine beauty.
J. Sanilac, June 2025
Two bonus unclothed images and a charming floral top that just missed the cut.
