The Secret of Beauty

Beauty Lies in the Eyes of the Beholder

The concept of "ideal beauty" has changed over time, based on a shift of cultural values. Beauty involves symmetry, harmony, and balance with nature and is associated with emotional wellbeing [1]. For example, women are widely acknowledged most beautiful when they are relatively young, with smooth skin and well-proportioned bodies (a waist-to-hip ratio of approximately 0.70) [2].

Ideal Meets Reality 

Surprisingly, scientists have found that “ideal beauty” can be found in "averageness" [2]. When averaging images of human faces to form a composite image, they are perceived as more attractive. In contrast, cultural values and the media influence “real beauty”. For example, in ancient China, women with small feet were considered more beautiful. Girls bound their feet tightly to inhibit their growth and appear attractive. Contemporary western media has extended this ideal of “slimness” to the whole body, often featuring very slender women and promoting eating disorders as a side effect.

An ideal beauty arrived in reality – Nefertiti. Her name means "a beautiful woman has arrived". Nefertiti, regarded a legendary queen of beauty, has been honored not only for her beautiful face, but also her kindness and intelligence. The definition of beauty is not only based on external features (i.e. facial and physical attractiveness), but also the inner beauty (i.e. personality, intelligence, grace, and charisma). Even cloaked in ugliness, we humans tend to prefer inner beauty to outward appearances [1].

Nefertiti bust in Neues Museum, Berlin, taken by Philip Pikart

The Value of Beauty

Beauty cannot be understood without ugliness. To be ugly is to deviate highly from “ideal beauty”. Ischizu and Zeki (2011) formulated a brain-based theory for this duality: our brain may have at least two different judgment systems for experiences involving beauty and ugliness [3]: The experience of beauty engaged the medial orbito-frontal cortex, an area containing the centers of desire, pleasure, reward, and value judgments in the brain. The experience of ugliness was confined to the amygdala and the motor cortex [3]. Gotshalk said that ‘‘beauty is a value’’, that it evokes desire and that whatever is desired has value [4]. This implies an intimate link between beauty, value, and desire in cortical processing.

BEAUTY CANNOT BE UNDERSTOOD WITHOUT UGLINESS.

What is Beautiful?

Our judgments of beauty are not arbitrary, but are slanted towards highly phenotypical and genetic quality to enhance survival and reproductive success [5]. A healthy, fertile mate offers considerable benefits over an unhealthy, infertile one in evolutionary terms. One example is that of mens' preference for women with high reproductive value (young and healthy) [6]. Thus, perceptions of beauty are likely evolutionarily determined by a “mate-quality hypothesis” [5].

Perceptual biases and associative learning also regulate beauty preferences [7]. Face recognition is not innate, though the ability to develop this skill is. Infants can discriminate between individual monkeys and human faces at 6 months, but not at 9 months without continued learning [7].

Given the same input (i.e. the existence of men, women, variation in age and features), we might expect to find generally similar preferences across cultures [8]. This can be tempered by associative learning of local conditions (age­‐specific fertility). Ghirlanda et al. (2002) showed that chickens share some of the same beauty standards as humans and that they prefer beautiful humans [9]. This result seems to speak against the mate-quality hypothesis, which suggests that preferences are species-specific. It might, however, be that similar preferences could develop by learning. 

CHICKENS PREFER BEAUTIFUL HUMANS.

Show, Do Not Tell 

Beauty seems to be about many obvious, but also subtle things and it might well be that beauty is not about anything except itself. If someone wanted to make sense out of beauty, it would kill what is great about it. But those who accept beauty on its own terms will find it a fascinating experience. Samuel Clemens said, “Don't tell us that the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream." Through interactive action instead of passive reception, it enables individuals to have their own experiences, interpret it in a way that they understand and lets them draw their own conclusions. Regardless of the complexity of beauty, its simple secret lies in the fact that you feel that you and someone (or something) can understand each other even without explicit communication.

[1] Umberto Eco, History of Beauty, 2004

[2] Little et al, Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci, 2011

[3] Ishizu and Zeki, PLoS One, 2011

[4] Gotshalk, J Philos, 1935

[5] Andersson, Sexual Selection, 1994
[6] Smith, Perrett et al, Proc Biol Sci, 2006
[7] Pascalis et al, Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci, 2011
[8] Coetzee et al, PloS One, 2014
[9] Ghirlanda et al, Hum Nat, 2002

by  Shuyan Liu, PhD Student AG Heinz
This article originally appeared 2015 in CNS Volume 8, Issue 2, Art. And the Brain.