It's trash, I know, sheer trash - but it had to be bought. Now magazine's current special on ''The World's Most Beautiful People 1998'' features ''over 100 fabulous STARS'', the balance about 60-40 between women and men. If you want a quick status report on the Western beauty myth, this is the place to go.

If you don't know it, Now is like Hello! for the younger, lustier, probably employed mother: pictures of Mick Hucknall (''Simply Randy!'') nestle alongside snapshots of ''Life with the world's first septuplets''. So it's not a bad perch, sociologically speaking, from which to assess what our current norms of physical attractiveness are.

This is not the push-up neo-porn of the lads' mags, nor the health-club perfection of the aspirational women's journals: we're in the heart of the mainstream here. There's even a mission statement: the magazine, claims editor Jane Ennis, is ''a joyous reflection of our multiracial society, and the beauty that lies in the differences between people''.

Multiracial? Only according to the most restricted quotas. Out of 108 fabulous stars, only 10 are black - Naomi, Tyra, and Halle, natch: Will Smith and Denzel Washington, as expected: and a smattering of male and female sports players. Vanessa-Mae the violinist, and Michelle Yeoh - the latest Bond-fatale - are the permitted Orientals. Behind them, a smattering of evidently dusky Hispanics and Latins. But no matter the complex ethnic and national lineages claimed in their blurbs, the rest are clearly 90-odd white faces. Of the 57 women, over half are blondes. Of the remaining men, well over half take Anglo/Irish/European surnames.

So really, apart from the token inclusions, these are the world's most beautiful white people - taken mostly from the celebrity conveyor-belts of Hollywood, and selected for the reading pleasure of a notably conservative British social grouping.

Yet if Now's assertion about the multiracial nature of modern stardom is definitely overdone, its other claim for this pantheon - that beauty lies in difference - is at least much more debatable. To decide that authoritatively - rather than just subjectively bitch about how Robbie Williams or Anna Friel would make it on to anyone's gorgeous list - we need to detour through some recent theories of beauty.

In his recent tome How The Mind Works, evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker has a cheeky but stimulating chapter on whether we are ''equipped with an innate eye for beauty''. Following the Darwinist rule book, Pinker suggests that ''sexiness'' is a set of biological advertisements or signals: it's about indicating to prospective mates that you are healthy, normal, free of infection, and thus able to reproduce.

We haven't needed to evolve medical instruments to check this out - because universal standards of human beauty do that for us. Which explains why ''symmetry, an absence of deformities, cleanliness, unblemished skin, clear eyes, and intact teeth are attractive in all cultures'', says Pinker.

Skim lightly through Now, or any other similarly-oriented publication, and you get his point immediately: every celeb scores on all six counts. No shave-rash, coffee-coloured molars, or dog's-bollock peepers to be seen anywhere.

But we can describe beauty even more functionally, holds Pinker. Testosterone shapes the male face during adolescence - building up bone in jaws, brows, forehead, and nose. Girls' faces should grow more evenly - and Pinker dares to measure female prettiness by a lack of testosteronal growth (''short, delicate, smoothly curved jawbone, a small chin, a small nose and upper jaw, and a smooth forehead without brow ridges'').

Female ''homeliness'', Pinker says, comes when a woman's face has the same geometry as a man's. As this indicates an excess of testosterone, which means less fertility and greater susceptibility to disease, she is thus less ''attractive''.

''The callous reckoning of natural selection'' also explains why the young always represent an ideal of beauty. Female faces become heavier and coarser with age and pregnancy: small-jawed, light-boned faces signify youth and virginality. And young virgins, in evolutionary terms, will always be the better wives - ''because they have the longest reproductive career ahead of them'', argues Pinker, ''and have no children from another man coming along''. So the cult of female youth isn't just a Hollywood thing: it's a species thing.

Before you take a Biro pen and stab it repeatedly through my picture byline, gentler readers, I've just gone back to Now magazine. See for yourself: most of Pinker's facial beauty criteria for men and women fit almost perfectly - whether it's Naomi Campbell or Nicole Kidman, Denzel Washington or George Clooney, Jennifer Lopez or Liam Neeson.

And the point about the Hollywood machine is that it can keep your image in a state of youthful pulchritude, even when the facts tell the world that you're past it, in Darwinist terms. Here, Isabelle Adjani looks like a smooth, fine 17-year-old - even though she's 43, and married with two kids. In fact, all modern women have the technology, says Pinker, to ''simulate and exaggerate the clues to youth, femaleness, and health'' - makeup, lipstick, eyebrow plucking, hair treatments, Wonderbras, skin potions, diet plans.

The professor has answers for everything. Slender supermodels? They're posing for other women, rather than for men. In this society, where wealthy women are likelier to be skinnier than poorer women, Kate Moss or Joely Kidd (both pointedly absent from the Now collection) are public players in a female status battle.

Voluptuous, impossible mega-babes? Consistent with his theory, but quite naively, Pinker suggests they may be evolutionary exceptions - a few thousand exceptions out of five billion humans, making the best of a media age. Their ''freakish combination'' of ''small waists, flat abdomens, large firm breasts, and curved but medium-sized hips'' triggers all the male evolutionary cues - and, suitably cultivated, would certainly provide career opportunities in the age of loaded, TFI Friday, and Melinda Messenger. But Melinda has, as we know, gone under the knife to develop her assets.

Aren't we leaving the impersonal, iron laws of evolution here, and entering into the realm of human choice and cultural conditioning? It's true that extremely sexist, closed societies demand that women cover up, from top to toe, in chadors and veils. And there's no doubt that the range and variety of female sexual display in Now - from Kim Basinger wrapped in a Gap sweater and Bridget Fonda in a white suit, to Eva Herzegovina in a corset and Claudia Schiffer in even less - bespeaks a Western openness and flexibility about beauty norms (driven, let's not forget, by female consumers).

And so perhaps we should try to value this openness, rather than enforce (as some feminists would) a visual puritanism, which may rub - with unnecessary harshness - against the grain of evolved human nature. Beauty isn't a myth; but neither is it fated nor fixed. And anyone who says that Nurse Hathaway in ER isn't the most beautiful woman on the planet - page 14, incidentally - has no eyes to see.

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