Man, the more I research about different perceptions of beauty, the more I find conflicting views. There are literally thousands and thousands of interpretations on this particular subject.
In each individual blog posts I plan on exploring different hypothesis, whether it be a particular website, an article or a midnight rant. This is going to be an interesting experience and who knows what will will end up finding out about ourselves.
At this present time I am starting a research essay on the evolving standards of different perceptions in our culture. I will be focusing mainly on the Human beauty aspect in my essay. I will be doing research with different kinds of sources, not just research articles but anything that will give a glimpse humanity.
Literature will provided an incredible wealth of material. I have some plans of printing a few excerpts from various books, from some romantic poetry to some descriptive sultry passage in a novel, to maybe shed some light on idealist views on love and beauty. But first of course I will have to hunt these down.
Visual art is also going to provide a good direction pointing towards the yellow brick road. A good amount of visual art is an attempt to recreate what is beautiful to the artist. Which makes the Mona Lisa even more intriguing, considering some believe its a self portrait of Leonard Da Vinci himself.
And the research articles I want to look into will be focused mostly on sciences that attempt to test a individual perceptions.
I found this website about "averageness" which I will be talking about on my next blog. But here is a taste while I do more research and write up about it.
http://www.faceoftomorrow.com/home.asp
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ReplyDeleteThis subject is extremely interesting. It is definitely something that is constantly evolving on our world. Especially with the mass communication and touch up software we have today. I remember reading or seeing something years ago that tried to find the most beautiful movie star or something. It ended up being Haley Berry because her face is almost perfectly proportioned and symmetrical, they said something about our brains really enjoy symmetry, don't know if I agree with it but it was an interesting concept. I'll try to track down the study or video it was.
ReplyDeleteThe question of “averageness” is interesting. The first website that came to my mind was hotornot.com. Seeing how different people can judge someone on a scale of 1 to 10 and then seeing what most people do rate some people is very interesting. The whole thought of putting a picture online for all to judge is just odd to me though.
This is probably my favorite topic! I am looking forward to reading the research that you come up with because I have always been curious about how attractiveness in people can change in all cultures throughout the years.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if this will help you or not, but last week in my Psychology 101 class, my professor, Dr. Henderson, lectured about attraction. She told us that there are two universals for attractiveness across cultures. The first is youthfulness (shockingly) and the second was good health. People are attracted to healthy human beings psychologically because they have the capability to produce and care for their offspring. She also discussed that we are attracted to similarities in our partner, such as having the same eye size and nose length, so that our kids end up looking like us. We are also attracted to symmetry, like Kelly was talking about.
I know that doesn't have to do with the different perceptions of beauty that change over time, but I thought it might be helpful to have knowledge of the few things that do stay the same. I am looking forward to your next blog about averageness! It seems like the number of average-looking women is growing in society.