I remembered the quote I was thinking of regarding this thread, its about the forms people choose to take in The Culture sci-fi society by Iain M. Banks:
“the tenor of the time had generally turned against … outlandishness and people had mostly returned to looking more like people over the last millennium”, previously “as the fashions of the intervening times had ordained – people … had resembled birds, fish, dirigible balloons, snakes, small clouds of cohesive smoke and animated bushes”.
The entry under ‘phenotypes’ explains a bit further:
Basically after a lot of experimenting most people go back to mostly being humanoid.
Liking What You See: A Documentary by Ted Chiang had an interesting take on this. In this story, it wasn’t that people could change their appearance so everyone was beautiful. Instead Chiang came up with the idea that it was possible to deactivate the part of the human brain that sensed physical attractiveness. You could still see other people and recognize their faces but you were no longer able to tell if they were beautiful or ugly.
Exactly. People will then overeat and not exercise to try to gain as much matter to work with. Or some might wanna be a pixie or some shit and the eating disorders go the other direction.