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Originally Posted by whswhs
I don't know if Appearance (Attractive) is appropriate.
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In my usual TL10 SF setting I use the mechanics of
Off-the-shelf Looks for characters who grew up on wealthy worlds with perfect nutrition, perfect health, no stress, and ideal exercise regimes.
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C and I used to joke that if we travelled a few centuries into the past, we would probably be considered Attractive: exceptionally tall (5'8" and 5'7"), no missing teeth, no smallpox scars. . . . But in the early 21st, we're just Average.
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When I was growing up I was kind of tall (and exceptionally robust, but that's another story). From year 7 to year 10 in the little high school I went to I was regularly third tallest out of twenty-two or twenty-three boys in my year, and I ended up 179 cm tall (5'10.5"). But compared with my nephews' contemporaries I am pretty short. Improved nutrition, immunisation, better treatment of childhood disease, reduced stress during childhood, and better athletic training seems to have produced, out of the same genetic material as my contemporaries, a swarm of young men over 180 cm tall (and one of my nephews is 197 cm tall).
Apparently the state of affairs in which the great bulk of men are distributed within a range of about a foot in height (say, 5'4" to 6'4") is the sum effect of about six inches of variation due to genetics and six inches of variation due to childhood environment. Give every child the same nutrition and exercise, the same experience of illness in childhood, the same profile of exposure to stress hormones, and the standard deviation of height would be cut in half. Make that the nutrition and exercise, the health and absence of stress that produces the tallest young men today, and you would raise the average height by three inches. The typical range of male height would contract from 5'4"–6'4" to 5'10"–6'–4".
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Your TL10 humans might strike us as Attractive, with their perfect complexions and unusually symmetrical bodies and faces, but I'm not sure that in their own era this wouldn't be discounted.
I think it depends on whether you think the human aesthetic response habituates or not.
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Well, height is clearly a component of attractiveness in men at least, and that must surely be judged relatively.