Enigma of Beauty
Jodi Cobb
National Geographic
What is beauty? Why are we so obsessed by it? Evolutionary scientists believe that recognition of beauty is an ancient, hardwired and universal biological means to ensure the survival of the species. They say beauty is an advertisement for one’s value as a mate, for the quality of one’s genes. Not everyone agrees. But everyone believes they know it when they see it. Beauty is God’s handwriting, Emerson said. But what makes people mad is there’s nothing fair about it.
Studies show that attractive males and females not only get more attention from the opposite sex, they also get more affection from their mothers, more money at work, more votes from the electorate, more leniency from judges. They are also seen as more kind, competent, healthy, and intelligent than their homelier counterparts. That’s not fair.
Preview
Standards of attractiveness are surprisingly universal. All cultures value symmetry, clear skin, thick shiny hair? all markers of youth, health and fertility. And people tend to prefer the average face and build to the extreme. Men like large eyes, full lips and small chins in women; women like large muscular builds, strong brows and chins in men.
But looks matter more to men than women. Men are looking short-term: procreation. But women, since the beginning of time, have taken the long-term view: who's going to stick around and help raise the family? That's where things like intelligence, kindness, status and wealth come in.
But this story is about looks. Appearance. Attraction. This is about the outer, not inner, beauty. I'm exploring the obsessive and absurd lengths we go to get it, prolong it or fake it. Or exploit it. This is not about the deeper feelings that lead to love and marriage. As Shakespeare said: "Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind." But that's a different story.
Beauty is a huge industry?45 billion dollars a year. Americans spend more money on beauty than on education or social services. They buy 1500 tubes of lipstick and 2000 jars of skin care products every minute. Two million plastic surgery procedures are performed every year. Beauty pageants are a billion-dollar industry worldwide. And the modeling industry keeps feeding younger and younger girls to the advertisers who sell us the clothes and cosmetics we think need.
But the insistent media images of the young and beautiful provoke unrealistic goals and distorted self-images for many people. Models have ratcheted up the standards of beauty to levels unachievable without surgery. And they are almost exclusively Western ?contributing to cultural dissolution worldwide.
In the past, colonizers and missionaries stamped out local customs in order to exert power over indigenous peoples. Today, television, movies and advertising are completing the job. And many of those traditions are rapidly being lost to history.
