It is the same with being accompanied by a very beautiful woman.

Without changing at all, the difference of how people treat you when you are accompanied by a very beautiful woman is staggering. People are more nice and polite even dare I say subservient. People low key treat you like you are some sort of important person.

Beauty, and proximity to it, was is and will be a social status symbol.

My pet theory is that it is a term in the objective function to limit the mutation rate; hence the theories that claim that beautiful faces are the "averaged" faces of a race/ethnic group