“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, this is a popular saying that turns out not to be true all the time. We all know there are basic concepts of beauty that were instilled in our heads as the common standard since we were kids; this programming embedded in our “psyche” is not easy to override. There will always be people playing the beast and others playing the beauty, it is required for contrast. There is a popular phrase that goes like: “If everything is important then nothing is important” That goes to tell you that the value of things is just measurable by a relation to the rest of other things.
Eternal Beauty on a canvas…
When expressing thoughts about beauty we all tend to place ourselves on either side of the spectrum (the ones that posses it an the ones that do not)
However, knowing that the value of something is only in relation to the rest of things that are within the same category, we can conclude that you are not to consider yourself beautiful or ugly unless you are surrounded by individuals in your same category such as living being, or human. This is just rational.
The same way, you are not to rank yourself without considering the pre-established concepts or the standards of beauty imposed by the “group de facto” or in charge of controlling the narrative on the matter.
How do you know a flower is beautiful? a dog? a tree? or better yet a painting?
In order to understand the concept of beauty we need to remove ourselves from the discussion so that our conclusion is not poisoned by any biases. We also need to eliminate any implanted notion or dogma. By doing this we are free to paint the concept on a clean canvas. Only when you are willing to fully commit to these rules you will get down to the genesis of the truth about the idea. We judge beauty based on our instincts, based on a gut feeling.
For a flower (regardless of the type) we may look at things such as how vibrant are the colors, for an animal we might base ourselves on how healthy it looks or the amount of fur (also a sign of health), for a painting we might consider curves or symmetry.
If you were to ask someone what they consider to be the most beautiful flower, painting or creature the answers would be scattered all over specially if you are not aware of the rules mentioned before. Nevertheless, if we catered to our biases there would be a tendency of ranking the most expensive ones amongst the most beautiful ones.
Dogs have a huge variety when it comes to the shape of their snouts, car’s fronts come in different shapes and sizes as well, And let’s not even talk about flowers.
When getting a dog, as a pet, we go by our emotions and functionality, same with cars. For flowers we might consider shape and smell.
A very healthy dog will mostly be considered beautiful since it is one hundred percent of what it is supposed to be. A brand new, symmetric and well polished car will also usually be considered beautiful in general. When things run as plan and they serve their purpose or when we hit our mark we might also say “beautiful”
If we eliminate our biases, and were to apply the rules of beauty to humans, we may conclude that any individual that is healthy and possesses good aesthetics is beautiful.
Special thanks to the painters and their masterpieces:
“Pygmalion and Galatea” 1890 by Jean-Leon Gerome. “Mona Lisa” 1503-1517 by Leonardo da Vinci. “Echo and Narcissus” 1903 by John William Waterhouse.