Thanks for the comment.

The reason I focused on women was partly selfish (I just like looking at women more than men), and partly because there are more social issues relating to female appearance than male.

It may be a myth that only men value looks. Personally, I think men focus more on looks than women, but it matters to both genders (as do the other factors but reversed). However, it’s plainly obvious that society at large values looks on women more than men. In many ways it must suck to be a women with all the focus on female physical attractiveness. The models that are pushed down our throats are the top percentage of attractiveness, following which they have a strong career and other incentives to stay thin and pretty (money, status/fear of losing status) which ‘normal’ women don’t have, then on top of that the pictures are airbrushed.

Then these pictures are distributed widely, so that our brain sees a greater degree and amount of highly attractive people than actually exists. So women start to hold themselves to a higher attractiveness standard than is realistic, and you end up with body image issues, eating disorders, and so on, which are more prevalent in women than men.

I completely agree with your last sentence though – we would be better off overall and as a society if we did that, but alas there are very influential people making a lot of money out of our current superficiality, and they have no incentive to change anything.

By the way, the morphed photo on the actual website Beauty Check ? Really does not do ANYTHING for me. Not pretty. Too big a nose, too small lips, mouth too low, eyebrows too thin, too boring facial form. In fact, were she to have a bigger nose for instance, she would become more attractive, because her face would be more interesting to look at.
The photo on your blog of the mash of faces (it’s a different picture than on Beauty Check!) is in fact pretty. I never found mannequin dolls in stores to be pretty at all.

Of course, the fact that I think it’s pretty is still influenced by the media. Were we to show more black faces, more Asian faces in the media, those faces would be deemed prettier and be appreciated as they deserve. I think that allready happened, with bigger lips (African) and more symmetrical faces (Asian) getting more popular. With the rise of the internet I have the hope that people of the world come in contact with eachother and value eachother, including their beauty, more.

And in the end, beauty does not matter. The fact that we make a fuss about it in women and not in men is merely cultural. We’d better spend our time doing something useful than on objectifying ourselves and other by only valueing looks, rather than intelligence, wit, humor and kindness.

We’ve all had experiences of getting to know someone and their “body and face” disappear. Their true beauty shines through. This is the unchangeable, real beauty to me. Probably belabouring the obvious…

The rest is interesting and even in some cases stimulating or attractive to the lizard brain! Is there any inherent “meaning” to it beyond we all struggle in some way with thinking we are “less than good enough?”

The net effect is that beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder, or the crazy bastards that dreamed some of that stuff up in different parts of the globe.

Great post by the way. You put a lot of thought and work into it and it shows

Is beauty just a cultural thing, based on whatever the common consensus is at any particular time? Or is there a ‘true beauty’, that we find in all cultures and times? …

I guess others like what Asians and Africans sense of beauty are also connected with their belief and culture. They don’t do that merely for sight unlike western women of today who really undergo surgeries to look better than her neighbor.

Glad you commented! This is one of my favourite articles and I wish it had received more attention than it did. I spent weeks researching and writing it!

Yes I recall something similar. It seems there is an innate aspect to beauty, particularly when it comes to faces. Babies spend more time looking at beautiful faces, and different cultures agree on who is beautiful – even cultures with little or no contact with each other. But other aspects are more open to interpretation and cultural difference, life body shape (with the caveats mentioned above).

And yes there is the ‘inner’ aspect to beauty. I suspect that perhaps women will on average be more likely to view beauty as being on the inside, but I am certain that many personality and compatibility factors will interact when people are deciding who is beautiful. All these studies can really uncover is the averages, which might tell us a little about human nature, but the real picture is probably much more complicated than I present here.

Cheers,
Warren

As to faces, I remember part of a documentary where babies focussed much longer on and came back to faces that would be deemed ” model beautiful” probably to do with the proportions of the features and the relative distance between them. It’s kind of all innate, I think the study concluded.

Real beauty is on the inside anyway, love, compassion, generosity and such.

What I’d be interested in is, if you could convince a girl that she’s as desirable as Angelina Jolie, so that she really believes it – would she be seen as more beautiful just because she acts differently (more confidently, expects attention, or whatever). And if so, how much more?

Because most of these studies were done by getting people to rate pictures of women – some even used cartoon drawings of different body shapes! This is fine if you’re specifically looking at visual attraction and trying to eliminate other variables, but in real life there’s a lot more going on so it’s hard to say how much practical use you can get from this.

Thanks for the comments Mohinder!