The Privilege of Being Beautiful

The Right Look Is Everything

But if you've ever been turned away by the doorman at an exclusive nightspot, you might find it hard to feel badly for the beautiful people as they enter.

Roxy Summers, night-life editor of heavy.com, a pop culture music and video Web site, arranged for "20/20" to videotape at the 205 Club in New York's SoHo.

If you didn't have the right look, you weren't getting in.

"The door staff picks and chooses who are the beautiful people and who is going to create the look for the night," Summers said.

And, 205's doorman Henry Binge confirmed, beauty opens doors.

"A beautiful face, of course, gonna get everywhere for sure," Binge said. "It's not about just beauty -- but beauty helps."

Summers, however, had little sympathy for the people who couldn't get in.

"I don't really feel bad at all for the people outside. … I mean you can't let everybody in."

Beauty, Evolution at Work?

We want to associate with beautiful people because we think their lives are so much better than ours, said Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher.

"It's just remarkable the attributes we give to a human being who is good looking," Fisher said. "We think that they are smart. We think that they're funny. We think that they're friendly and warm, and social and popular."

But that's so stupid, I told Fisher.

"I suppose it is stupid, but natural selection has evolved all kinds of mechanisms in order to win, and this is one of them," Fisher said.

By natural selection, she means thousands of years of evolution. Good looks are often a sign of health and fertility, so evolution has conditioned us to prefer certain looks.