What sort of woman do you go for? Blonde or brunette? Curvy or slim? Tall or petite?

After that, you may think your choice is only limited by the women who happen to be attracted to you. In a nutshell, you’re not too fussy.

In which case, the following facts might surprise you. Increasingly, scientists are discovering that men have some pretty weird - if largely subconscious - rules of attraction. Read on to find out why you go for girls who look like you - and several more.

You fancy you

That’s right, really you fancy, well, you. Even if you’re not the sort of man who looks in the mirror every morning and blows himself an admiring kiss, you probably fancy women who look just a little familiar.

That’s suggested by a study which asked 100 men to choose the women they were most attracted to from a selection of photographs.

The men were then asked to rate a selection of photos of women where the image had been digitally manipulated to look like them. In that experiment, well over a third of the men went for the face that most closely resembled their own.

The researchers then analysed photos of real life couples and found that spouses tend to look more alike than two randomly selected strangers.

Relationships expert Jean Hannah Edelstein said: "I think this is less about narcissism and more about the comfort of what we know.”

You fancy your mum

And if you don’t fancy yourself, the chances are you fancy your mum. Yuk!

Actually, you don’t fancy your mum, but you may fancy women who look a bit like her. That was the finding of a study by Hungarian researchers, which found that men are more likely to go for women whose bone structure was similar to dear old mum’s.

The study is further evidence of what psychologists call “sexual imprinting”, which means we tend to be attracted to faces that we are comfortable with. Those preferences are partly set in childhood.

Rather scarily, the study also found that women are most taken with men who resemble their fathers.

You fancy blondes

It’s not a great surprise that a survey earlier this year found that men are 3% more likely to opt for a blonde over a brunette if they were given the choice.

The only question is why? Being blonde doesn’t make a woman prettier, healthier or more suitable for bearing children, so why is hair colour even a factor.

Psychologist Dr Simon Moore, of London Metropolitan university, believes it is simply a learned preference. “Far more blondes than brunettes appear on our television and movie screens so we’re going to be conditioned to finding them more attractive,” he said.

But another theory is that blonde hair tends to darken with age. Subconsciously, men want to mate with young fertile women who are more likely to produce healthy children. Before women could become blond-haired from a bottle, light blonde hair was a genuine sign of youth.

You fancy bodies

You may think you always prefer curvy or skinny women. In fact, scientists reckon it’s not set in stone and may depend on the circumstances.

In societies where food is quite scarce, for example, men tend to be more attracted to curvier partners. But in societies where food is plentiful - like our own - leaner women are often considered more attractive.

But that’s not all. More strangely, scientists have found that men tend to go for curvier girls when we’re stressed.

In one British study, men were asked to rate photos of women for attractiveness, but half the men were put in a stressful situation first, which included a mock interview and public speaking task. The stressed men were found to be more attracted to heavier women than their calmer counterparts.

It could be that even short-term stress has a similar effect to the stress we feel when food is scarce. Stress seems to trigger a desire for a partner who appears - through body shape - to have access to resources.

You fancy woman who are tired or drunk

In a somewhat controversial finding, researchers at the University of Texas recently found that some men were attracted to women who they thought might be drunk, tired, immature or of low intelligence.

But that was only true in men looking for short-term relationships. The researchers theorised that men rated these women as more attractive because they looked most ‘exploitable’.

That’s a loaded term, but what it means in this case is that the women may have been more likely to fall for your best chat-up line and end up in bed.

These aren’t the usual traits most men go for, so it shows that the rules of attraction change depending on whether men are looking for long-term love or a one-night stand.

The rules of attraction

Of course, none of this is set in stone. Some men prefer brunettes, and some prefer curvier women even when they’re not stressed. Similarly, many end up with women who look nothing like themselves and whose cheekbones bear no resemblance whatsoever to those of their mothers.

But the studies that reached these conclusions were scientifically sound and found patterns that could not be explained by random chance alone. So it seems that, for many of us, the rules of attraction might be far less straightforward, and far more weird, than we may have thought.

Refrence : uk.msn.com