You may have noticed an international study on female self-perception of beauty making the newswire rounds. Some of the findings reported were interesting enough that I bothered to look up the actual paper and I can't say I was surprised to find, yet again, that journalists are scientifically illiterate. Rather than women having outrageously low self-esteem, the main finding of the study is that "beauty" is an amorphous concept that even physically attractive women are loath to claim. (However, the Introduction notes that people don't seem to overestimate their physical attractiveness like they do with just about every other attribute.) Some other interesting facts I inferred from the findings: