Why are we attracted to pretty faces ?

I always wondered why we find certain faces attractive in the first place. We’re told it’s about “health,” but the features people consistently rate as attractive don’t always correlate with actual health, so it feels like a paradox. If facial attractiveness is supposed to signal biological fitness, why does the scientific evidence show such a weak connection? And yes, beauty is subjective, but there are still people who are widely seen as more attractive than others. When a large number of people agree that someone is attractive, it stops being purely subjective and becomes a kind of collective pattern. So what exactly is going on psychologically that makes certain faces almost universally appealing?

And I say this because it’s paradoxal to me since it’s such a important element in attractiveness and how much we like a partner. And I am talking purely about facial attractiveness here because I can understand body attractiveness displaying signals of health and fertility which causes the attraction

I see that health comes back a lot as an argument and it does become true at a certain extent. For example why do we find people attractive and others average ? Saying that it’s about health only would be seeing things in black and white when there are levels of attractiveness that our brain scans for. You don’t see someone and only thing that person is attractive or unattractive. You could probably say that he is average or unattractive or attractive or really attractive. So coming from this logic, we can also deduce that a person that our brain categorizes as average has the same visible health signs than someone that our brain categorizes as attractive or really attractive, so what does someone more attractive have over someone average that makes him more appealing to our subconscious?

It basically means that there is a factor that separates average from attractive

Also it is not about pattern recognition because what makes people attractive is that they are above average which would make them above the average pattern recognition system. And when I say good looks I mean what we objectively find good looking, I mean solely facial attractiveness, what makes us value it so much ? Like it’s subconsciously a really important thing, especially when straight males pick a mate, so I was wondering why is that ? I mean there has to be reason that makes this an imperative, because every guy wants a pretty partner. Either he has one or not

So, maybe I’m ignorant but to me it feels like biology more than psychology because it’s so embedded in our subconscious. Like when we see someone our brain immediatly categorizes the person into an attractiveness degree. So the connections happen super fast, it’s not something we have to consciously think about. Actually the other question wouldn’t be why we find them attractive but : What makes it so important in our mate selection ?Because for most people it is technically what determines our attractiveness for someone (just by looks) so there has to be something important associated with it.

Also when I say important I mean that for example most guys would judge the face as a more important factor than the rest of the body that would technically indicate higher fertility markers