Beauty is a quality that is often associated with positive emotions such as happiness, joy, and pleasure. It can also be used as a metaphor for a person’s personality and self-worth.
It can also be defined by physical characteristics such as facial symmetry, body shape, weight, skin color or even clothing styles and trends. There is a lot of research into how people perceive and judge others in terms of their beauty, and how this can impact their social lives.
Until the eighteenth century, most philosophical accounts of beauty treated it as an objective quality: they located it in the beautiful object itself or in the qualities of that object. Plato’s account in the Symposium and Plotinus’s in the Enneads connect beauty to a response of love and desire, but locate it in the realm of the Forms and the beauty of particular objects in their participation in the Form (see Moore 1903).
The classical conception of beauty, however, was different than this: it treated beauty as an instantiation of certain proportions or relations among parts, usually expressed in mathematical ratios. This idea is best exemplified by a now-lost treatise on beauty, the Canon (also known as Polykleitos’s or The Sculpture), which was held up as a model of harmonious proportion to be emulated by students and masters alike.
In the twenty-first century, a number of theorists have begun to think about beauty in new ways. Some have reconstructed the classical concept, while others have sought to reconfigure or reappropriate it in feminist and anti-racist contexts.
One of the most important issues to emerge from this reconstrual is that it takes the antinomy of taste as its starting point, rather than its end. This shift suggests that the experience of beauty is not primarily within the skull of the experiencer, but involves a connection with other observers and objects such as works of art and literature in communities of appreciation.
This change is a result of the growing influence of social media and the need to create a more inclusive society. It has become much easier to be beautiful and to have a voice on the internet, so we are no longer limited by what society has decided is ideal.
A recent study on the neuroscience of beauty shows that the brain has three separate modules for judging facial attractiveness: for identification, for interpretation and for valuing. These modules are important because they enable the brain to identify others and value them, as well as to detect fakes or deception.
The human brain is under pressure to maximize reproductive fitness, and that pressure is manifest in the way we perceive beauty. In this context, it makes sense that the brain’s judging of facial attractiveness is under pressure to accentuate certain traits, such as age, health, face and body proportions, facial color and texture.
It is clear that beauty has become a socially constructed construct, and that it is important to think about how this is influencing our perceptions of beauty, both as individuals and in groups. It is especially important to consider how these constructs can be used to promote or resist oppressive systems and norms.