A Tale of Two Heathers

The Essential Difference Between Beautiful and Cute

Heather is a hot girl’s name. This is the immortal and eternal truth for every man of the generation known as X. It was really a rather remarkable situation even at the time, for while there were vast quantities of Jennifers and Amys, who ranged the gamut from beautiful to ugly, the Heathers were reliably and relentlessly attractive. I even verified this with my high school yearbook; there wasn’t a single plain Heather to be found in it, and two-thirds of them were in the school’s top tier.

One of the reasons the 80’s were awesome: we had Heathers. Heathers are the best.

This unusual state of affairs was recognized and memorialized for all time with the release of the now-classic 1988 film Heathers, which along with Weird Science, The Breakfast Club, and Grosse Pointe Blank, really covers everything one might need to know should one harbor any desire to get a handle on Generation X and its cultural milieu.

Not even Winona Ryder was hot enough to be a Heather. She was a Veronica.

Two of the reasons for this preponderance of hot Heathers were the two most famous of them, namely, Heather Locklear and Heather Thomas. Heather Locklear was the more famous, more popular, and the more successful of the two actresses, in part due to her penchant for dating and marrying high-profile rockstars, including Bret Michael of Poison, Tommy Lee of Mötley Crüe, and Richie Sambora of Bon Jovi.

But while there were copious hours of debate dedicated to which of the two Heathers was the true Heather #1 in real-life, the two women serve as an excellent metric for distinguishing between the truly beautiful and the merely cute, for serving as a starting point for defining what makes a genuine 10, and even for demonstrating how lower-status men tend to overrate lower-tier women while ignoring their higher-tier counterparts.

In short, this post serves as the beginning of the answer to the question that was repeatedly asked in response to the post entitled A Controversial Opinion in which I observed that the classic beauty icon Marilyn Monroe was never an actual 10. The two Heathers serve as a useful starting point, because even though Heather Locklear was more famous and more popular, and even though tens of millions of American men considered her a definite 10 at the time, she was observably never more than an 8 even at her best, which is obvious when she is compared to a true 10 from the same era, Heather Thomas.

This is the difference between and 8 and a 10. Heather Locklear doesn’t have one single feature that compares favorably with Heather Thomas’s features.

Compare the two headshots. Everything about Heather Thomas, on the right, is observably of higher quality than Heather Locklear on the left. Her hair is fuller, prettier, and better styled. Her eyes are bigger, brighter, and more striking. Her nose is much more refined - literally, as she had a very good nose job - and her smile is picture-perfect. Her cheekbones are more defined, as is her jaw; she observably has the bone structure of a 10 that always ages well.

Heather Locklear looks like a cheap knock-off of Heather Thomas, as if she might have been available at Target for one-third the price of the name brand.

About the only argument that one can reasonably muster against the headshot comparison is that Heather Locklear’s picture is more of a casual candid photo, while Heather Thomas’s is a casual studio photo. But that attempted defense doesn’t hold up when one compares their swimsuit photos, both of which were obviously taken in studios.

It might be shocking to younger readers in the aftermath of the Enfattening of America, but Heather Locklear’s body was actually what most young women’s bodies looked like, with some degree of variation, in the 1980s. What passes for normal today was usually considered the token fat girl or fat guy in our high school classes. Even Heather Thomas’s body wasn’t completely outside the range of what one would expect to see at the local beach or pool. Notice how neither women exhibit any signs of serious body modification or fitness sculpting; this was the age of aerobics, Jazzercise, and racquetball that preceded gymbunnies lifting weight, doing Crossfit, and turning themselves into graffiti galleries.

And while one might argue that Heather Thomas’s picture has better lighting and is from the photo shoot of her popular swimsuit poster, that’s sort of the point. Heather Locklear didn’t have a swimsuit poster because she couldn’t sell swimsuit posters. She simply didn’t have the body for it.

So, what was the secret of Heather Locklear’s generally greater appeal to young men and why is she better remembered today? Did she just choose better television shows? Did she have a better agent? Perhaps, but that doesn’t explain why so many young men genuinely preferred Heather Locklear to Heather Thomas in the time of their mutual peak; perhaps they still do today for all I know. The answer, I think, can be seen in the comparison below.

Approachability is how an 8 beats a 10 in the average man’s eyes.

Heather Locklear looks friendly and eminently approachable, like the proverbial girl next door. Even as a famous and pretty celebrity, she looked like you just might have a shot with her if you ever got the chance to meet her. Heather Thomas, on the other hand, even pre-nose job, looks completely unattainable to the average guy; she’s clearly the sort of head cheerleader material who is reserved for the Alphas of the world. And the sort of friendliness and potential approachability that Heather Locklear radiated in her youth trumps beauty for most men. Lower-status men understandably find approachability to be more attractive to them than actual physical attractiveness, which is why the lower on the SSH one goes, the more generous the female ratings tend to become.

And, for some reason, it’s not enough for lower-status men to overrate the less attractive women, they also find it necessary to denigrate the unobtainable higher-tier women, which is the source of the well-known “2/10 Would Not Bang” meme.

In the event that you’re not still convinced of the truth of these observations, or think that the choices of the images chosen for the comparison between the two Heathers are somehow unfair, this candid picture of the two of them taken together at an ABC event that was a strange sort of televised competition called The Battle of the Network Stars in 1982 should suffice to provide conclusive evidence of the fundamental difference between beauty and merely being cute, between a genuine 10 and is what frankly looking rather like more of a 7 here.

The same height… but the 10’s legs are longer and her body proportions are better.

We’ll delve into this in more detail in future posts on the subject, but an important aspect of the objective concept of female beauty relates to the underlying bone structure. This is where true beauty separates itself from youth, neoteny, approachability, attainability, charm, charisma, style, and other factors that are either subjective or intrinsically short-term, because bone structure lasts a lifetime.

This is why the true beauty, the genuine 10, is far more likely to age well, and remain attractive far longer, than women who are merely cute or pretty. And it is why how a woman ages must always be factored into how she is rated historically, even at her peak.

The two Heathers in 2023. It is informative to note that the true beauty is four years older here than the formerly cute one.

And if I strike you as being biased in any way, rest assured I am not. In fact, neither of these women was ever even my favorite Heather.

For you see, reader, I married one.

And yes, she is still beautiful.