Polish researchers have discovered that the perfect set of legs is five per cent longer than the average, meaning that your run-of-the-mill Polish woman at 5ft 4in tall with an inside leg measurement of 29in would require 30.5in legs to compete with the celebrated pins of Oz popstress Kylie Minogue.

Minogue has, of course, topped a few "best celebrity legs" polls, and while she's just five feet tall, she "has legs that are proportionally long compared with her small frame", as the Telegraph puts it.

This astounding leg revelation is the work of the splendidly-named Dr Boguslaw Pawlowski at Wroclaw University, whose team asked 218 male and female volunteers to rate seven silhouettes of a man and woman in order of attractiveness.

All of the images were the same height but had varying leg lengths, and the test participants expressed a preference for those boasting an extra five per cent in leg length.

However, excessively long legs - ten per cent longer than average - were considered less attractive than average legs.

Pawlowski rather confusingly explained the whole thing by noting that "that long legs signal health", so we're not quite sure why really long legs don't measure up to moderately extended limbs in the eye-pleasing department.

Still, he was pretty unequivocal about why people don't much like short legs, viz: said legs are linked with "a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and type II diabetes and with higher levels of a body fat called triglyceride, which is linked to the clogging of the arteries, heart disease, strokes and insulin resistance in men". ®

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