I feel sorry for romance that lately beauty is “out of fashion” (LOL.) There’s nothing wrong with being good-looking and pretty people fall in love same as anybody else.

So if you had asked me whether I prefer heroines who like the way they look vs. one’s who think they are flawed, I’d have picked the former option. I have a couple reasons for this. First of all, a heroine obsessing about her looks is boring. Even one who obsesses about what’s she’s eating is boring. Grow up already. Accept your imperfections (we all have them) and move on to something more interesting and less narcissistic. (Put another way, I don’t think a heroine’s poor self-image is a good reason to keep the hero & heroine apart; it’s just too self-indulgent.)

The other reason is that having a character’s physical attributes described in overly-flattering or overly-disparaging ways is like a thumb on the scale: it distorts what’s real within the fictional world. I had a problem, for example, with Catherine Montefiore in Kathleen O’Reilly’s Sex, Straight Up. In her own mind, she was unattractive. I finally decided to ignore her own self-deprecation because it annoyed me. My guess is that she was very beautiful but not a size zero. That’s okay because women who are size zero are occasionally very very unhealthy indeed. But apart from the heroine’s self-assessment (definitely negative) and the hero’s attraction to her (quite obviously positive), we readers didn’t get any more reliable information.

Mostly, though, I think it’s okay if characters in romance novels are all acceptably attractive because the alternatives are too distracting. People with physical attributes outside the statistical norm (I count myself among that number) fall in love, but their love stories don’t read like romances. My husband tells me I’m beautiful not because I want to hear it but because to him I’m beautiful. That’s a pretty harmless bit of self-delusion, but in a book — flattened to fit on the page — it would look odd and need a lot of explanation. In real life, I just laugh at him.

I don’t read books with characters who completely define themselves by those things all the way through because its just not interesting. Looks can have a big effect on a person and if handled correctly those issues can be fleshed out without all that nonsense.

OTOH, I want the hero to believably fall in lust as well as love with the heroine. She’s got to have something to appeal to his animal appetites. Her charm, integrity, inner beauty, intelligence, etc are certainly the key drivers, but I like it if she has beautiful skin or eyes or some other physical attribute. It’s not required, just a personal preference. An example is Laura Lee Guhrke’s Guilty Pleasures, where Daphne is plain but has the body of a goddess.

But if her appearance is pointed out as especially perfect or especially flawed, then it had better be important to the story.

If not, I don’t see the point in dwelling on her looks.

I don’t usually understand what it means when a books says (for example) “her mouth was too wide for her to be beautiful”. Does that mean she looks like Julia Roberts? I think she’s beautiful.

Recently I finally came across a man that I would describe as “not handsome but compelling and sexy” (Australian actor Callan Mulvey) but even then I feel it is very much in the eye of the beholder. However, for the first time, I could imagine what that sort of phraseology means.

In any event, by the end of the book, if I like the characters, they have become, if not perfect, physically beautiful.

Whether she’s physically beautiful or plain, faultless or flawed–it doesn’t matter, just make her strong and smart, as I aspire to be.

Before I had my horrible children, I had a 20 inch waist–and dated a couple of tall guys who could span it with one hand. And encircle it with two. *sigh* Kids ruin everything.

Good try, but it was from the days when Native American, Viking, Medieval, futuristic roms and contemporary roms were popular. Also western and ante-vellum(?) historicals, if I remember right.

I misunderstood, then. I thought you were saying it wasn’t possible with two hands in any era. Of course, I could learn to read more closely. ;)

Kudos to Meredith Duran on this. In Written on Your Skin, the heroine is beautiful. But she has so paid her dues. And she’s scarred. I love a scarred heroine almost as much as a scarred hero.

Corset training. It was possible and desirable in the Victorian era.

Good try, but it was from the days when Native American, Viking, Medieval, futuristic roms and contemporary roms were popular. Also western and ante-vellum(?) historicals, if I remember right.

But even so, it still would not be possible for a typical male hand to span a waist. It’s just not physically possible. If a typical male hand can curl around a typical mug, look at the size of the mug and tell me again it’s possible for a waist to be that size. Two hands? Possible, but one hand? Nope. Won’t believe it. :D

“handspannable waists”

Corset training. It was possible and desirable in the Victorian era.

If not conventionally beautiful, I vote for physically flawed.

If a person with a physical disability, I vote for anything but this.
It’s not because the heroine has a disability. It’s because the author tends to go overboard – the swan-diving off a mile-high cliff kind – with the angst of having a disability, which usually irritates the hell out of me.

Physically beautiful characters – female or male – generally bore me. Again, it depends on how the author does it. If she harps on about the heroine’s beauty, into a bin the book goes. Same for physically flawed heroines. If the author repeatedly points out how plump the heroine is, how skinny she is, how twitchy she is, how ordinary she looks or whatnot, it’s putdownable.

That said, I think I do have a psychological hatred for “handspannable waists”, which used to be part of what made the heroine so perfect and beautiful. You know, “…so tiny that his hand – JUST ONE HAND, MIND! – could easily span her waist WITH STILL ROOM TO SPARE!” Oh, please. I can’t even span a three-year-old’s waist with both of my hands. Either his hand is freakishly massive or she’s literally a lamp pole.

But, in other genres, I would go for the heroine who is imperfect and finds a hero who loves her “just as she is”. Who didn’t fall in love with Colin Firth/Mr. Darcy in Bridget Jones when he tells her he accepts her and likes her “just as she is”?

I think a flawed heroine works as long as the hero finds her beautiful. That being said, I don’t know if I would read a lot of books where the heroine is severely flawed/”ugly”. It might distract from the fantasy element. Average, a scar, burns, not a beauty but charming (as Scarlett O’Hara was described in the novel version)… those things I’m totally comfortable with. I think the difference is whether the physical flaws distract from the heroine’s other attributes. If she’s dynamic, witty, and smart, it is easy to overlook those things and see why the hero loves her. But, if ugliness is her main attribute and there’s not some sass or wits to drown that out, then I would not read on. I don’t want a heroine I would pity.