[OC] 25 years of fashion models vs. the US population: almost no overlap in body fat, and even “plus-size” models sit below the average American woman

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2602380123

This is panels d–g from a new PNAS paper on the cultural evolution of beauty standards (Boucherie et al., 2026). It compares US-based female fashion models against US women aged 17–30 from the NHANES health survey, using Relative Fat Mass (RFM), an estimate of body-fat percentage derived from height, waist circumference, and sex.

What the panels show:

• Panel d: Models cluster tightly around an RFM of ~18% (underweight range), while the general population centers near ~38%. The two distributions barely overlap. Notably, even the high end of the model distribution, where the "plus-size" outliers live, stays well below the average American woman, whose mean (the blue dashed line) sits to the right of nearly the entire model curve.
• Panel e: The annual gap (NHANES minus Models) sits at roughly 20 percentage points and is essentially flat over two decades. The fitted trend is ~0.01 points per year, i.e. no convergence.
• Panel f: A PCA projection of body measurements separates the two groups along lines of constant RFM, suggesting selection happens primarily on body composition.
• Panel g: PCA loadings, where bust/waist/hips drive PC1 (overall size) and height drives PC2 (slenderness).

The paper's broader finding: even though representational diversity (hair color, ethnicity, national origin, occasional plus-size casting) has increased, the typical model physique hasn't changed. The added variation comes from a few tail outliers, not a shift in the median, and the industry's "plus-size" category is still leaner than the typical woman it's nominally meant to represent.

Source: Boucherie, Kumar, Ledebur, Lohse & Śliwa (2026). "Cultural evolution of beauty standards." PNAS, Vol. 123, No. 21, e2602380123. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2602380123 (open access)

Tools/Methods: Dataset of 793,199 model work records (2000–2024) scraped from models.com and fashionmodeldirectory.com, benchmarked against NHANES. RFM = 64 − 20 × (height/waist) + 12 × sex. Code and data public: GitHub (github.com/LCB0B/evolution-beautystd), Zenodo (zenodo.org/records/17638160). Figures are Python (matplotlib).