I was on the redline the other day and found myself wondering, how many people are beautiful? What's the percentage? They certainly stand out, and i've sat on few subway cars that didn't have at least one. But how common are they exactly?
I started counting off everyone I saw, starting over back at one when I saw someone who was beautiful. I got up to twenty first, then ten, then 3.
At that point the exercise became very difficult. I was no longer capable of judging who was beautiful and who wasn't. What are my standards of beauty?I asked myself. They became unclear quite quickly.
I stayed in this mindset for ten or fifteen minutes, out of the subway car and up the escalator into Davis Square. That person has a lovely face, perfect, I would say to myself, they're beautiful. But would I describe them that way if someone asked me what they looked like? No. So they're not beautiful. Hm. It all became very vague, and not as fun.
I started thinking more about the genetic forces behind beauty. It was at least clear from my experiment that beautiful people were a minority. If beauty confers such a huge advantage in mating, and hence in natural selection, why isn't everyone beautiful? Of course it's all relative, and if you cut out everyone in our world who we would call beautiful now, we would probably just adjust our standards. And people can become beautiful just by getting to know them. Yet there are clearly people who are just plain gorgeous, by any standard, or just plain ugly, by any standard. Why?
rate
email
print
link to this page
Comments: 6
I also had an ugly baby one time. My husband and I thougt he was beautiful. We also thought he looked just like a really ugly old man in our neighborhood. We also thought he looked like Nikita Kruchev. His older brother though it was unfortunate how ugly he was, but kept this to himself. My husbands best friend wouldn't agree with my husband that he was the most beautiful baby in the world, and this hurt my husband's feelings a lot. Years later we looked at his baby pictures and thought he was the ugliest baby that had probably ever been born. Fortunately he turned out to look pretty handsome. But does the parent need to see the baby as beautiful to ensure that we will take care of it?
Why do I think my mother is beautiful even though she is 82, and looks so old to herself that she thinks she doesn't look good anymore? Same thing in action?
How we delude ourselves in assessing beauty is a mystery to me, especially since as you saw there are lots of not so good looking people out there. The vast majority in fact, I have often noticed.
I have heard second hand reports of clinical studies (and their results seem to sync-up with reality) wherein participants were shown a series of photographs of people and asked to judge the subjects as attractive or unattractive on some numerical scale. As the pictures were whittled down from "mixed bag" to the "beautiful people" so were distinguishing features cast off in favor of the visually frictionless.
Smooth skin, complete symmetry, co-operative hair; our eyes shy away from any unique or anomolous mark in judging beauty.
The fewer irregular lines and surfaces on your body, the fewer physical complexities, the more likely that you are "beautiful."
Beauty is boring.
Post Script: Not suggesting that a big nose makes you an interesting person, but When I'm on a bus or train I don't like to be bored by what I see.
Then today reading The Secret History by Donna Tartt, I was moved by a passage in which a body of students and their professor are discussing the idea of beauty. These young classics majors determine that beauty is derived from a sense of terror. This then led me to Yeats' "terrible beauty" and onward to make a connection to my own thinking on beauty and how I hesitate to call most things beautiful unless I'm completely struck down by it.