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It is possible to notice and judge female beauty via peripheral vision alone, without the details being in focus and without any thought. It happens instantly.
beauty implies fertility
According to researchers at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, their study is the first to demonstrate that female facial appearance is connected to reproductive health. Estrogen levels determine the development of facial features, and the more estrogen a woman has the healthier and more fertile she tends to be.
I once wrote a short story about a Monster that could only see you through you seeing him
Sometimes I'm in a crowd and can first feel the presence of a beautiful woman off to one side or the other before actually looking in her direction maybe a few tenths of a second later. Most of the time the feeling is correct - yes, she is beautiful. Sometimes the feeling is wrong, say she's much older than expected. Yet even in that case, if I were to take a picture and blur it, the first impression from a direct gaze at that picture would be good - not too fat or too thin, classic female shape, probably long hair too.
Conversely, if a woman is very fat or too thin, not an attractive shape, or has very short hair, then my peripheral vision will not trigger the feeling that moves my eyes in her direction.
I'm pretty sure you could put reverse-blinders on men, blocking the view straight ahead and allowing only peripheral vision, and prove that men can quite accurately judge a woman's beauty without even directly looking at her. Given the extremely high evolutionary relevance of female beauty (beauty implies fertility), it makes sense that there would be very quick and low-level responses to it. Women might also be able to get a first impression of men without even directly looking at them, but perhaps not, because men are judged by women much more on what they do than on how they look.
A similar phenomenon is that "someone is looking at me" feeling, after which you turn to see that "yes, there are two pupils focused on me". This is also very highly relevant for survival in evolutionary terms, since someone looking at you might mean they want to mate with you or attack you, things which might make the difference between your genes' survival into the next generation or not.
#biology