Why do beautiful people have ugly babies?

[Anonymous]

I noticed this with a friend recently. Her and her husband are gorgeous (Barbie and Ken) and their child is not ugly, but not cute either. Then I realized a LOT of good-looking celebrities have weird looking kids too. What is up with that?

[Anonymous]

What does the mailman look like?

[Anonymous]

Ugly babies turn into cute toddlers.

[Anonymous]

Sometimes people are gorgeous because they have unusual features that make them striking, or features that look good on an adult but not on a baby. I think we have a very small range of what we think of as "cute" for a baby because we're programmed to think of the Gerber baby as the benchmark of baby cuteness. And sometimes I think the features combine in weird ways to make for less-cute kids, or recessive traits come out in the kids that aren't evident in the parents.

I've noticed the opposite - people that are plain or unattractive but have very cute babies. One of my friends is gorgeous - she has done some modeling - and her parents are just average. (her dad is on the border of funny-looking.)

[Anonymous]

OP -- I notice this same thing in church every week. I suppose there are many possibilities in the gene pool when 2 people mate.

We had one set of attractive friends who had the ugliest baby I've ever seen. Then, it was really awkward when they'd say something like "isn't this the cutest baby you've ever seen"? Well, no, it wasn't. I think generally that higher weight babies tend to be more attractive since they've had more time to form.

Good question though! I'd like for a geneticist to weigh in here.

[Anonymous]

Some of the most attractive people I know claim they were "ugly babies".

[Anonymous]

I'd rather be an ugly baby than an ugly adult. If the parents are hot, then when the features settle out, I would think the baby would be hot in later life.

I know a guy who looks like Tom Cruise. His baby has his Tom Cruise nose. That nose on a baby is a BEAK, I tell you and he was the ugliest baby I've ever seen. He now at 12, is getting hot like daddy.

[Anonymous]

99.999% of babies ARE ugly.

[Anonymous]

I don't know of any ugly babies.

[Anonymous]

I think it's probably just a matter of expectations. One might expect to beautiful people to have an even more beautiful baby, and when the baby is average or less than average, one might then feel surprised due to expectations.

The same could be true with ugly parents - expecting an ugly baby, then being surprised when the baby is cute.

[Anonymous]

Same reason that some beautiful kids come from pretty unspectacular parents.

[Anonymous]

On average they don't have ugly babies, but they don't have babies (nor adult children) as gorgeous as themselves. It's because of regression to average. It is unlikely that the very rare combination of genes that made them very attractive will happen again, even though the many of the same genes are there. So their children will be closer to average though, in most cases, still above average. You can see that children of Hollywood couples are rarely ugly but rarely as gorgeous as their parents.

[Anonymous]

This thread reminds me of a Seinfeld episode. An attractive couple had an extremely ugly baby.

[Anonymous]

The kids have the parent's pre-surgery faces.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:On average they don't have ugly babies, but they don't have babies (nor adult children) as gorgeous as themselves. It's because of regression to average. It is unlikely that the very rare combination of genes that made them very attractive will happen again, even though the many of the same genes are there. So their children will be closer to average though, in most cases, still above average. You can see that children of Hollywood couples are rarely ugly but rarely as gorgeous as their parents.

I like your theory.