Brains Vs. Beauty, by Randi Braun

Have you ever wondered about that bombshell stereotype? You know the one. Imagine you’re walking down an aisle in a supermarket and approaching you is a gorgeous blonde wearing cutoff, denim shorts and a low-cut, white tank-top. She has long, tan legs, perfect breasts, and a face you could stare at all day. (Men, you are salivating. Women, we are mentally picking her apart because she makes us feel insecure.) What kind of job do you think this woman has? I’ll bet your first guess wouldn’t be: a biotechnical engineer. Or an astro-physicist. Or a college professor. We would probably suspect that she doesn’t have the brain-power to hold down a career that requires such intellectual ability. But why do we assume this? Because she’s pretty? Precisely.

Why do we typically assume that the most beautiful people in the world are not the most brilliant? The answer? Because they’re not*. In fact, to take the example even further, I bet some of you figured that the sexy supermarket-shopper was an idiot. And you know what? There’s a very good chance that you were right.

But….why? WHY do the prettiest people—women in particular—tend to be the dimmest colors in the proverbial box of crayons? Having been born and raised in Los Angeles, I’ve been exposed to this brains/beauty discrepancy since childhood, but it was only recently that I began to ponder its origins.

Whenever this topic arose in conversation with friends, I heard the same hypothesis: “Well, Randi…pretty people are dumb because, when growing up, they were given special treatment by their parents/peers/members of the opposite sex and, therefore, never actually needed to exercise their brains. Duh!” So…beauty leads to a lower IQ? Hmmm. That doesn’t sound very plausible, nor does it explain the opposite yet equally baffling phenomenon: exceptionally intelligent people tend to be, well, not exceptionally attractive.

[Note: I'm not talking about your run-of-the-mill intelligent people. I'm talking about those lucky few who make doctors and lawyers look like idiots. Basically, the present-day Einsteins of our world]

The evidence of the “all brains/no beauty” phenomenon can be observed, among other places, on the campus of the California Institute of Technology: a relatively small school that annually rivals MIT, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton for the title of the highest-ranked university in the country (according to U.S. News & World Report). Many Caltech graduates go on to pursue careers in the fields of mathematics, nuclear physics, biotechnology, and planetary science. Also, a relatively large percentage of them end up working for NASA, as Caltech manages NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In other words, the students at that school are cockeyed geniuses.

My brother, being a cockeyed genius himself, spent his freshman year of college studying at Caltech. Whenever I’d visit him at school, I would notice something very interesting about the female students who were roaming the campus. Most of them were HIDEOUS! I mean…frighteningly hideous. And the ones who weren’t hideous were average-looking at best. There is actually an old saying: “Caltech: where the men are men, and the women are men too.” I wouldn’t argue with the person who came up with that adage.

However, we still haven’t answered our question: Why do brains and beauty rarely go hand-in-hand? Well, I’ll tell you.

I figured it out last December after a chance encounter with a girl who lives across the street from my parents. Neighbor-Girl (who we’ll call “Mara”) and I were both attending a holiday party/booze-fest that was being hosted by the awesome 75-year-old lady who lives on our block. I was aware of Mara’s existence, and I’m pretty sure she was aware of mine, but we had never been formally introduced. All I knew about her was that she worked as a model, and that she, like me, was 24-years-old.

On the night of the booze-fest, I made my way over to 75-Year-Old-Lady’s house and opened the front door to see a living-room full of my drunken neighbors, all of whom were ages 50 and above. After politely wishing a merry Christmas to everyone I knew, I made a bee-line for the wet bar and asked for a Heineken. I cracked open the bottle and as I took my first sip, Mara walked through the front door (…….Holy crap). The girl was STUNNING!

Mara and I introduced ourselves and after she got a drink, we sat down on the couch and began to chat. As it turned out, she wasn’t some lame-ass model who had landed a few gigs for some crappy catalog that nobody reads. She had been on the cover of Fit Body magazine and in the pages of Maxim, Stuff, Vanity Fair, and Sports Illustrated. She was also a Playboy Playmate of the Month a few years back.

[Just to hammer home the degree of this girl's beauty: let me say, I am not unhappy with my physical appearance. In fact (and I don't mean to sound arrogant), I quite like my face. However, after speaking with Mara for a few minutes, I excused myself to the powder room, and when I looked in the mirror, I gasped. After staring at Mara’s gorgeous face, my reflection looked somewhat like a disastrous Picasso, which was then used as a canvas for a spin-art project.]

Anyway, after trying to fix my troll-like appearance, I returned to the couch and continued my conversation with Mara. It wasn’t long before I picked up on her moderate-to-severe intellectual deficiencies. She wasn’t very articulate, she seemed to have a limited vocabulary, and she had dropped out of college after one semester because school “just wasn’t her thing.” (This latter fact didn’t automatically make her an ignoramus, but since I was already pretty sure that she was an ignoramus, it didn’t help her case.)

Mara didn’t have much in the way of personality either. If someone asked me to describe her character, using the word “vanilla” would be far too generous. She was more like unsweetened plain yogurt, or that first bite of a Sno-cone, or a stale, unsalted rice-cake. It was actually pretty sad.

When the holiday party ended, Mara and I said our goodbyes and I went home feeling very frustrated; I had just spent upwards of two hours conversing with the very essence of my puzzle, and yet, I was no closer to finding the solution.

The next night, while driving to CVS to pick up some extra Christmas lights for our artificially-pine-scented, synthetic tree, everything clicked. Women aren’t dumb because they’re beautiful, nor are they smart because they’re ugly. It’s just the opposite. They’re beautiful because they’re stupid, and they’re ugly because they’re smart! It makes perfect sense!

For example, let’s take Mara: the walking poster-child for the “all beauty/no brains” phenomenon. She has shiny, flowing blonde hair (some of which might have been extensions), a cute little nose (which was obviously the product of rhinoplasty), and boobs that are so perfect, I couldn’t help but suspect that they had been surgically altered as well. Her makeup was applied beautifully at the party and during our conversation, she admitted that she spends a considerable amount of her spare time working out at the gym. Mara doesn’t just happen to be a 9.99 on a scale of 1 to 10; beauty didn’t fall into her lap like some gift from above. She invested a significant amount of time and energy into molding herself into the gorgeous creature that she is.

So now you might be thinking, “Ok, so she goes to great lengths to make herself attractive. What’s your point?” The point is this: if she had any other redeeming qualities, she wouldn’t have jumped through so many hoops to increase her level of attractiveness. However, since we know she can’t rely on her intelligence or her personality to get her through life, she had to take advantage of the one attribute that she was able to control…her appearance.

This also explains why the average female student at Caltech looks somewhat like the monster in your closet. She doesn’t bother with silly things like watching her weight, getting contact lenses, searching all over creation for the outfit that best flatters her waist-line, or covering her blemishes with makeup. Nor does she spend money on dyeing her hair that perfect shade of sun-kissed blonde, or implanting saline-filled plastic bags under her pectoral muscles. Maybe she doesn’t even run a comb through her hair as often as she should; she has more important things to do, like use her brain! She chooses to partake in stem-cell research instead of following some strict, 6-day-a-week workout regimen.

So…now that we have our evidence, we can answer our question. Or better yet, we can state a theory:

“Because possessors of vast intelligence are busy changing the world instead of obsessing about their respective physical appearances, and because the intellectually-challenged have learned to compensate for their cerebral handicaps by enhancing their superficial attributes, there often exists an inverse relationship between brains and beauty.”

Yay!

You, of course, don’t have to accept my theory, but it works fine for me. And for someone who always wants to know the reasons behind life’s little intricacies, it felt good to figure this one out.

*This excludes women whose beauty requires no maintenance.