Women are bombarded with the same message daily - whether this be from TV advertising, celebrities or women's magazines - the point they're uniformly trying to convey is that money may not buy you happiness but beauty just might. While we're often dismissive of such communications, a new study has actually proven that they were right... providing you live in the city, that is.

The researchers for the journal of Personal Relationships have discovered that happiness for urbanite women is based on physical appearance while country-folk don't count on looks in terms of overall life satisfaction and happiness. Evidently if you are one of our rural sisters, it's more of a case of ‘pretty is as pretty does'.

‘City women who were the most attractive got a lot of bang for their appearance buck,' says the study's lead author, Victoria Plaut. ‘And if you were even slightly below average, you were very clearly worse off.'

In the country there was no correlation between physical appearance and happiness, Plaut says there was even a slight trend for women in the country to be happier if they were chubbier.

So what can we learn from our country sisters then ladies? Lisa from Albury Wodonga says she believes the reasons for this are simple. ‘There is a lot of pressure in the city, but in the country we're happy and secure in being ourselves. If I go down to the store wearing a tracksuit nobody batts an eyelid.'

Part of that sense of acceptance comes from living in a rural community where everyone knows everyone, alleviating the need to make first impression or fit to a mould.

In competitive and individualistic cultures you have to compete for limited social attention and physical attractiveness is one of the variables. Whereas in communal cultures and rural areas, family reputation and other longer-term variables have a bigger impact, in turn lessening the focus on physical attractiveness.

The researchers for the study haven't yet looked at how all this plays out in suburbia, but they suspect the character of each community is the deciding factor. In other words, looks are likely to matter a lot more in Bondi than the Back O' Bourke. Perhaps us urbanites need to take a leaf out of our country sisters' book!