In his 1908 autobiography, Francis Galton described a “beauty map” he’d compiled of the British Isles:

Whenever I have occasion to classify the persons I meet into three classes, ‘good, medium, and bad,’ I use a needle mounted as a pricker, wherewith to prick holes, unseen, in a piece of paper. … I used this plan for my beauty data, classifying the girls I passed in streets or elsewhere as attractive, indifferent, or repellent. … I found London to rank highest for beauty; Aberdeen lowest.

In 2008, psychologists Viren Swami and Eliana Hernandez set out to compile a beauty map of their own, this time focusing on London. They asked 461 residents to rate the physical attractiveness of men and women in the city’s 33 boroughs. For the record, the City of London, the City of Westminster, and Kensington and Chelsea were rated highest — which correlates with the affluence but not the health (life expectancy) of the residents in those boroughs.