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If one ever had questions about why the female ideal of beauty changes with time, one needs wonder no more. A recent research has determined that women become more beautiful as a response to evolution, The Telegraph informs. Men, on the other hand, remain the same from an aesthetic point of view.

Researcher Markus Jokela from the University of Helsinki has come to the conclusion that we can literally speak of a “beauty race” after studying data on 1,244 women and 997 men from America, who were kept under observation for four decades of their life. Data gathered shows that attractive women usually have more children than their less visually appealing counterparts, with most of these being girls as well.

Similarly, good-looking couples are more likely to have girls than boys, with statistics showing that the former also tend to grow up to be equally as beautiful, if not actually more beautiful than their mothers. This way, a pattern is created that ensures that younger women become better looking than their mothers, which would explain, of course, why the female ideal of beauty has been subject to such drastic changes throughout the centuries (compare Nefertiti, Mona Lisa and Angelina Jolie, for instance).

Jokela’s study is not the first to show that beauty is, indeed, passed on from mother to daughter only to become more striking in the latter, The Telegraph notes. A 2006 research conducted at the London School of Economics by Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa also determined that, as the beauty gap between men and women was becoming wider, beautiful mothers usually gave birth to beautiful daughters and had more children than less good-looking women.

“Physical attractiveness is a highly heritable trait, which disproportionately increases the reproductive success of daughters much more than that of sons. If more attractive parents have more daughters and if physical attractiveness is heritable, it logically follows that women over many generations gradually become more physically attractive on average than men.” Dr. Kanazawa said at the time, as quoted by the aforementioned publication.