Costly Beauty: Effects of Trait Exaggeration and Material Cost in Footwear on Perceptions of Female Attractiveness and Wealth

Women's appearance modification practices have been theorised to function through two complementary mechanisms: supernormal stimuli, whereby trait exaggeration exploits evolved perceptual biases, and costly signalling, whereby visible expenditure communicates resource access. The present study tested these frameworks using a 2×2 factorial design manipulating trait exaggeration (flat vs. heeled footwear) and cost (economy vs. luxury brand) in a laboratory setting with 279 raters who evaluated life-size projected images and gait videos of 55 female targets across five footwear conditions. Mixed-effects models revealed that trait exaggeration consistently enhanced both attractiveness and wealth perception ratings, with the strongest effect observed for wealth perception in static images (d = 0.49). Cost manipulation produced statistically significant but very small effects on wealth perception (d = 0.10), and these were inconsistent across trait exaggeration levels. No synergistic interaction between the two factors was observed, contrary to prediction. Video stimuli yielded a reversal of the attractiveness benefit of heeled footwear, suggesting that the physical demands of wearing heels can undermine their perceptual advantages when walking proficiency is observable — a finding with implications for understanding the social costs of appearance modification. These findings add a carefully controlled data point to a literature characterized by considerable heterogeneity in designs, effect sizes, and conclusions. The modest, context-dependent effects observed here suggest that the perceptual consequences of appearance modification are unlikely to be reducible to a single mechanism, and that reliable conclusions will require studies examining cumulative multi-item modifications, individual differences in targets and observers, and ecologically valid social contexts.