• Question: What is beauty?

    Asked by Kieran to Rose, Maggi, Kirsty, Ben on 12 Jun 2017.
    • Photo: Maggi Laurie

      Maggi Laurie answered on 12 Jun 2017:

      Beauty is essentially something, or a group of things, which make you attractive (“pleasing to the senses”) to other people. What classifies as ‘beautiful’ is different for each individual person. For example, some people might find blue eyes attractive, others brown eyes, and the same for height, body shape, and personality traits (if beauty can be considered more than physically, which I think for most people is true).

      Beauty is not only an individual preference, but is also shaped by culture and, possibly even genetics? (e.g. research has found that people attractive the eye colour of their opposite-sex parent) However, within cultures, there seems to be consensus on aspects of physical beauty (e.g. in Western culture, broad shoulders in males, and thin waists in females, are typically considered universally attractive).

    • Photo: Rose Turner

      Rose Turner answered on 12 Jun 2017:

      Some psychologists also believe there are evolutionary reasons that people find certain things beautiful. For example, across the world, people tend to like landscape paintings that have trees and water and wide horizons in them (rather than abstract shapes) because they would have been the sorts of environments that our ancestors lived in.

      From this perspective, people that look healthy are usually considered attractive because they would be able to produce healthy offspring. However there are definitely lots of social influences that alter what we think of as beautiful, too, because society often tells us what we should think of as beautiful (and these ‘ideals’ or ‘fashions’ have changed over the decades and centuries).

    • Photo: Ben Kenward

      Ben Kenward answered on 12 Jun 2017:

      I have a friend who did an experiment. He trained chickens to tell human male faces apart from human female faces. They had to peck when when they saw a female face, but not peck when they saw a male face (or the other way around, doesn’t matter). So then my friend looked at which faces they pecked at most. It turns out the faces that chickens pecked at most are also the faces that humans on average think are most beautiful.

      This suggests that the sense of beauty might sometimes come from really simple processes, like the need to tell female and male faces apart. Turns out, if you like women, then they ones you go for most are likely to be ones that look least like men, whether you are a human or a chicken.

      That’s not to say that if you look a bit androgynous no one will find you beautiful. We are just talking group averages here, not what everyone thinks.

      This experiment got an Ig Nobel prize which is like a Nobel prize but awarded for comedy value as well as scientific merit.

    • Photo: Kirsty Miller

      Kirsty Miller answered on 16 Jun 2017:

      I think beauty is something that we find aesthetically pleasing (or pleasing to see or witness). However, this is very much ‘in the eye of the beholder’ – we all find different things beautiful. While there may be some cultural definitions of beauty that can influence us (for example, slim women tending to be preferred now, whereas in the past, heavier women were considered more attractive), there are still huge variations between people. Ultimately there are so many things that can influence what we find beautiful, that it really does just depend on the individual….

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