Mr.
Yasser Hashmi
M. Omer Sheikh: 2003-02-0129 Monday 1st May, 2000
Perception of Beauty
What is beauty?
Many have asked this timeless question only to be
left mystified with a more mystifying answer. Plato said that what is beautiful
is good where as John Keats wrote "beauty is truth, truth beauty".
But in this objective world of today these answers don’t suffice. Science asks
to impart its share of understanding and in this paper we set out to discuss
science's understanding of beauty. We find beauty in all fields of life, from
art to animal kingdom to nature in its wildest displays,
but in this paper we will be focusing our attention on idea of beauty in
humans.
Beauty in
animal kingdom
We humans very easily classify animal as being
beautiful or not, but have we ever considered what animals consider to be
beautiful! Given our lack of communication with them, we arrive at our
conclusions form their observed behaviour.
The male of Gallus Gallus, an Asian jungle bird,
sport brightly coloured head combs and feathers that lose their luster if the
bird is infested with parasites. The female of the specie is known to favour
birds with bright ornaments. By doing so the hen improves her chance of
selecting a mate who is resistant to disease and which will enable her to bear
offspring.
Similar is the case with Japanese scorpion flies. For them beauty amounts to symmetry more than colour or size.
The female flies under observation tend to choose mates that have well matched
wings. Studies indicate that such male scorpion flies are better at killing
prey and defending their catch from predators. Randy Thornhill, an ecologist at
the University id
Beauty in
Humans
Man has known beauty since he first came into
being. Cleopatra is known to have worn Kohl,
an eyeliner made from ground minerals. Women of the
court of Louis XVI drew blue veins on their shoulders and necks to emphasize
their noble hood. In the 18th century vermilion rouge made up of a sulphur and mercury compound accounted for lost teeth and
inflamed gums in men and women but did they care? Women sickened and died from
the white powder that they dusted on their faces: it contained lead. But all
was fair in the desire to be more beautiful. We don’t find a single culture
where we don’t see a notion of beauty. The men of the Huli people in the
highlands of
The ideals of beauty differ from culture to culture.
And have changed with time. At one time in
But these days the ideal female figure has changed
and transformed into a far more streamlined and less curvaceous structure with
numerical ideal figures of 36:24:35 inches. The case of men has been more
consistent and the ideal man still has a sturdy well built structure contrary
to what the men of the Dinka tribe might consider ideal. Though
it must be said that the need to enhance the structure has suddenly emerged in
the last century, as is evident form the dramatic surge in men going into
bodybuilding, the equivalent of women trying to maintain leaner structures.
But what does this marked difference in what people
consider beautify signify?
New research is challenging the idea that the ideals
of beauty vary from culture to culture. Studies have shown that people every
where, no matter what race, class or age they belong to, all show a common
sense of what is attractive.
Then what is beauty and how is it that we find
certain people attractive and others not? Are the preferences in human specie
any different from those in the animal kingdom? Does the equation
‘attractiveness equals biological quality' hold for humans as well? The answer
to this is yes, in a way.
We prefer healthy people for the reasons that Beauty
is Health, as psychologists put it. But why is it a preference?
Theories go back to the hunter gatherer era of human
existence. It was a time when survival was all that mattered, just as it still
is in the animal kingdom. Beauty in those days translated into optimal body
systems, which eventually translates into survival. Hence ‘science examines
beauty and proves it a strategy’. The strategy of survival. The selectivity of that period has been
programmed into our mental and bodily systems and hence we tend to find certain
people simply irresistible purely due to biological reasons.
But what about the present age. Are our preferences
in beauty still dictated by the needs of bygone eras? No one suggests that
points of attraction never vary, but how come studies we find that people from
different cultures share a common idea of attractiveness. Women form India,
China and England were asked to rate pictures of Greek men. All of then
responded in the same manner showing almost same preferences.
One argument that can be raised is that it is the
overshadowing influence of the western culture. But fortunately for the UT
Austin psychologist Judith Langlois, there was a group that had not been
exposed to this bias: the infants.
In a series of revolutionary experiments in the late
80's she showed that even infants have a sense of what is attractive. 3-6 month
old babies were placed I front of a screen and were shown photographs of faces
judged as attractive or unattractive by adult judges. Surprisingly the babies
gazed significantly longer at ‘attractive' white female faces than unattractive
ones. Since then the experiment has been repeated with white male, black female
and even other babies’ faces. The same results always emerge.
What is then beauty made of we may ask again.
As we discussed and the Rutgers University
Anthropologist puts it "all animals are attracted to other animals that
are healthy and show signs of competence". But the rules get even subtler
than that.
Another key to attractiveness is symmetry. Humans
like animals show a preference for individuals whose left and right sides are
well matched.
Like scorpion flies, we prefer symmetry. Biologists
have long used Bilateral Symmetry, the extent to which the left and right sides
of a creature match, to gauge what is known as Developmental Stability. Given
ideal conditions, paired features such as eyes, ears, feet, wings, come out
matching perfectly. But pollution and disease can meddle with these and the least
resilient creatures become unsymmetrical.
Randy Thorhill after his experiments with scorpion
flies set out with psychologist Steven Gangestad to measure the body symmetry
of hundreds of college age men and women. After adding up seven bodily measurements
they came up with the persons over all asymmetry. Then the persons were asked
to fill detailed confidential questionnaires. Results of the 1994 study sowed
that symmetrical males started having sex 3-4 years earlier than their most
non-symmetrical ones which meant that they were physically more active.
Thornhill says that people with symmetrical parts
tend to have "a whole suite of attractive features”. In a recent study
researchers at University of Michigan find evidence that even facial symmetry
is related to health.
One of the other qualities shared by attractive
people is their 'averageness'.
Researchers found more than a century ago that if several faces were
superimposed, the resulting face was usually better looking than any of the
images that went into it.
The preferences for extreme normality make sense
from an evolutionary point of view. As Langlois says “individuals with average
population characteristics should be less likely to carry harmful genetic
mutations".
But there is more.
The faces we find most beautiful are not average but
they are extreme or exaggerated. This was shown by New Mexico State University
psychologist Victor Johnston using a computer program called FacePrints. People
participated in an online survey and made newer faces by superimposing features
of different pictures on them. Many pictures were made and then ranked. The
lowest ranking pictures were then removed from the pool of pictures. The survey
stopped when a picture was awarded 10 points. As a rule Victor finds that the
ideal female face has a high forehead than an average one as well as fuller
lips, a shorter jaw and a small chin and nose. In a 1993 survey the ideal
25-year-old woman had the abundant lips of a 14-year-old and the delicate jaw
of an 11year old. His unpublished findings suggest that a big jaw, strong chin
and an imposing brow are prized in a male face. The tiny jaw that men prefer in
women is essentially a 'monument' to estrogen, which translates into fertility.
Similarly a large jawbone in males caused by a surge
in androgens are 'honest advertisements 'of a superior immune system.
Donald Simons, an anthropologist at University of
California, Santa Barbara, says that a large proportion of a woman's mate value
can be judged from visual cues, and mounting evidence suggests that there are
no better cues than the relative contours of hip and waist (recall Victorian
preferences). And the hip to waist ratio of healthy fertile women comes out to
be between 0.6-0.8.
Psychologist Devandra Singh modified the
waist-hip-ratio (WHR) of seven Barbie dolls in a study to determine how body
shape influenced the perception of attractiveness. Participants of the study
considered the Barbie with WHR of 0.7 the most attractive. And when we talk
about preferences changing over time, Singh found that the Miss America winners
from 1923-1990 got leaner over the time, but their WHR stayed constant at 0.7.
Similarly, the WHR considered ideal for men is 0.9
as it signifies a robust health, maturity and overall dominance.
The fashion and the cosmetics industry are leading
us in different direction altogether. It creates ideals, which do not conform
to reality, and in turn we have US$ 20 billion per year being spent on weigh
loss in the US only. Teenage girls suffer form Anorexia and Bulimia, eating
disorders that fail their bodies and disrupt their lives. Plastic surgery,
implants, lifts and liposuctions, all are geared to make us beautiful. In the
search for a better face and more beauty people often forget to look for the
important aspect of life. As writer Geoffrey Cowley rightfully writes in the
weekly Newsweek “ Our beautylust is often better suited to the Stone Age than
the information age; the qualities we find alluring may be powerful emblems of
health, fertility and resistance to disease, but they say nothing about peoples
moral wealth.
Are we all bound to go for beauty and is it still a
hunt for mates? Certainly not. Humans came to dominate the world by brain,
learning to master the natural urgings that were bad for us. Not being
absolutely symmetrical doesn't mean that we won't find or attract mates and
bear offspring. Among humans cleverness, power, wealth, wit and fame fill the
voids for the esthetically lopsided. But still science does go on to quantify
and present the Enigma of Beauty in a matter of fact way and tells us how we
perceive the people around us and what goes on inside our heads, hidden from
us, when we chose to declare someone as attractive or not. The research is not
yet complete and the science of what beauty is still in its infancy and
surprising results keep emerging all the time. But we need not worry that much,
the science of making people beautiful is in full bloom and as long as it survives
there shall always be another beautiful face to stare at!
·
Newman, Cathy. (2000, January). ‘The
Enigma of Beauty’. National Geographic, pp. 94-121.
·
Cowley, Geoffrey. (1996, June 3). ‘The
Biology of Beauty’. Newsweek, CXXVII No. 23, pp. 46-54