Why beauty is beautiful

This is really cool. It's been known for a while that prototypical images are more beautiful than their individual images. For those of you who don't know, it's called the "beauty-in-averageness effect" and a famous test in the 1990s gave large evidence in support of it when people scored computer composites of 16 faces higher than any of the individual faces (the same faces that had gone into creating the composite face, in fact).

Recently, researchers from the University of California, San Diego, the University of Otago, New Zealand, and the University of Denver expanded on this idea by asking "why?".

They measured response time of people to rate a variety of things, as well as other tests (if you want further explanation, leave a comment and I'll post more details of the tests) and concluded that beauty basically depends on what you've been exposed to and therefore what you identify with the quickest.

This is very interesting because it accounts for cultural and historical differences in beauty, as well as people's tendency to follow fashion trends of all kinds.

Edit:
Here's an article about this story
And here's the full research article, if you want to go more in-depth