On Beauty

I love french noses. Red hair. Round faces. Green and blue eyes. Smooth skin. Well-defined cheekbones. And so many other things. When we meet someone, especially of the opposite sex, we usually make a 'hot-or-not' judgment within milliseconds. I know I do. And it puzzles me. What is it about bone structure and flesh distribution that makes some people stand out from some others? Is this not some form of racism?

What I am talking about is beauty. But what does this word mean? It is certainly slightly different for each one of us, but some objective criteria persist, generally relevant to symmetry. Also different cultures consider beautiful what is thought to be healthy. We perceive beautiful people as being more likeable than less attractive people. If we accept that there is no fundamental correlation between external appearance and personality, what are we looking for in beauty? Why would we consider a person with asymmetric facial characteristics as having a worse personality than someone who has a perfectly balanced face? In fact, due to this beauty bias, the opposite could be argued. A person who is considered beautiful would be more prone to let us down since they are spoiled by the positive evaluations they receive by default. A person who has to work for the evaluation they receive would be more likely to value it. But we still persist in our bias towards beauty, in fact today's culture may place greater emphasis on it than the culture of generations before us.

If we see humans as evolved animals, there must have been some usefulness for the beauty factor. We know that malnourished organisms have less energy to expend on superficial concerns such as external appearance. They are too preoccupied with survival. Animals go through great trouble to advertise their energy surplus by developing aesthetically pleasing but otherwise useless features (think peacocks). Similarly, male birds develop elaborate singing techniques to make their call to the females. This energy surplus essentially signals a well fed animal, hence a good fit for the current environment, an animal that can provide both good genes to and be strong enough to protect its descendants. So beauty is a great evolutionary mechanism in areas where natural selection applies great pressure.

Out of this elaborate instinctual interplay, little is relevant in today's human society, at least in the developed world. We are not under pressure for survival, individually or as a species in general. I'd venture so far as to say that most every woman in today's developed world would be an absolute stunner in the eyes of a primitive human of 10,000 years ago. We just have a way more resources at or disposal, we have a much more varied and complete diet than the average human of ten millenia ago. But what about relative attractiveness? What does the difference in attractiveness between two females of the same culture tell us? Some things such as skin quality and height might be indicators of genes and upbringing. Other things, think nose shape or hair colour, may have nothing to do with fitness at all. In many cases, our obsession with beauty is nothing than an evolutionary heuristic, gone wild. if this is true, it harms us more than it helps us in choosing potential partners when personality factors may after so much more in building a healthy, sustainable relationship. I assume soft external factors such as 'style' may imply something about personality but that can only go so far.

I guess what I am trying to say is that I am disappointed at myself for not being able to see past beauty. And I've tried. I fail to be attracted to people who I personally don't consider externally pleasing although I am well aware how little this actually means. I wish I could choose potential partners filtering for other criteria than beauty since in pragmatic terms it limits my choice based on seemingly irrelevant factors. At the end of the day it decreases my possibility of finding the best available partner, since I am looking at more or less the same place that everyone else is looking and disregarding the same people that everyone else is disregarding. Maybe an amazing person that I would automatically classify as a friend for lack of attractiveness for example.

On the other hand there is something inside me that would like to believe that beauty has meaning, it just 'feels' right. But what is it? Is beauty a distraction for the beholder, an instinct gone bad, or something we should actively look for in our potential partners?