Its becoming popular to say that it is. How do we arbitrarily decide that something is beautiful? How do you go from: “Hmm, I feel indifferent about the way you look” to “Hmm, you know what, I think I’m just going to call you beautiful and anything different imperfect”. Beauty is socially constructed? Do we tell ourselves this so that everyone feels good about themselves. Their are too many subtle features for someone to teach you what is beautiful and what is not. Even subconsciously. I suggested the possibility that it was genetic. They considered this “unscientific”. I think they’re just mad because it sounds mean. But please explain to me how two hypotheticaly persons with identical genetic makeup will differ in their opinion of beauty. These two blank slates (cause I guess instincts is just a myth) will pick different ideas of beauty? No cause?
Like most things, standards of beauty lie somewhere in the middle of the social and the genetic. We do have certain genetic predispositions (symmetry is a big one, as well as secondary sex features like breasts, butts, muscles, and so-on) but oftentimes the particulars of how people feel about these things is determined by society.
Get a big fat book with a title something like Personal Beauty. You will have to agree that there is a truthiness about most of the chapters in that book.
But I don’t think you can find a worded answer for your question, because the answer is in your eye: try out this site: morphases.com/editor/ , you can morph faces: make the eyes more narrow, broaden the mandibular arch, shrink the nose and so on and so on. By looking and not by reading is how you’re going to find the answers to your questions.
Now open up a fat book with a title like History of Art, start rolling back through time, look at paintings, sculpture, and other visual media. Lucas Cranach the Elder was painting about five hundred years ago, I’d say he painted quite a few hotties ( antiquark.com/img/nefertiti-grid-small.jpg ).
But a few things interupt beauty in Art; most importantly when the artists were not aiming for beauty, the Aphrodite statues and Rubens are so often misunderstood in this way.
But why does one person prefer one face to another? Here I think you ought to look into yourself, most likely here your own experiences would have built up preferences that affect the Platonic-like glyph of personal beauty. Also accesories or cues make all the difference, shave her head, take off her earrings and lipstick and there isn’t much left to look at.
Across a culture there can obviously be trends, in Indonesia these days, a light complection, non-flat nose and big eyes are the characteristics you’ll see on most movie and TV actors; something far from the appearance of most Indonesians; and do the people really think like this? It would seem so by conversation about beauty with Javanese. But then are these not the qualities that are broadly prefered all through time? (Maybe not in sub-Saharan Africa?)
But then some people do find something very different beautiful? Obesity. Pre-teens. Homosexuals. Here are I really think you need to look for something like a super-novan experience, something that branded a flash memory into the mind; possibly it is also linked to deep anxieties and dreads about death and absurdity and so on. Can a whole culture have their thinking branded like this?
No. Something’s beauty its the closeness to perfection as that type of thing. Some people have a skewed sense of beauty, however. The differences of opinion are not evidence for its objective inexistence, rather evidence for varying types and degrees of error.
i think it’s a mix of subjective individual perception and certain standards set by society
Beauty is not as subjective as once thought. Symmetry of the features and body seem to be key, and not just in the human world. i’ll try and find a source on that…
Young females of reproductive age that show signs of fitness seem to be cross-culturally selected over others. Or at least, you know, a huge bias.