No , the narrate - tell sign of female fecundity is not thebox office numbersfor theultimate ab - fill up rotation - festthat is theMagic Mikesequel . As it turn out , women — at least , college - age , mostly white adult female in one small UK study — do show strong-arm signs of hitting their top birthrate for the calendar month .
These cleaning woman ’s faces turned redder during ovulation , but subtly enough that the human eye could n’t discover it .
As described in the journalPLOS ONE , a chemical group of UK researchers shoot 22 women with no makeup on every weekday for a month , measuring the variety in their peel tone over the course of their reproductive bicycle . ( None were on hormonal giving birth control condition , since it might have thrown off the results . ) The researcher used a camera designed for detecting camouflage to ensure that it could accurately catch colour , and valuate change using a data processor programme that identify the same discussion section of the face in every pic . The participants measure hormonal change throughout the calendar month themselves .

When the women were at their most rich , as show by their hormonal traffic pattern , their skin was redder than at former stages of the ovulation cycle . But while the change was pregnant enough to appropriate computing machine to measure out it , it was n’t enough to be picked up by the naked eye .
This change is clearly less obvious in us than in some of our primate congener , whose buttsturn bright redwhen they ’re experiencing estrus .
" We had thought facial peel color might be an outward signal for ovulation , as it is in other primates , but this study shows facial redness is not what men are pick up on , ” field of study author Hannah Rowland of Cambridge University said in apress release , “ although it could be a small piece of a much larger puzzler . ”
Previous studies have found that world find womenmore attractivenear the sentence of their ovulation ( evenjust through scent ) , even if they ca n’t quite put their finger’s breadth on why .
One study of 22 , mostly white , college - age women does n’t provide enough evidence to generalize about the entire world population , so take these determination with a big grain of salinity . But the cogitation does indicate that at some point , human richness may have been visible . Maybe this explains the endure temptingness of red lipstick .