The concept of beauty - 2

[part 1]
Let me analyze the factors which shape our perceptions of beauty. Firstly comes the purely personal ones, which are highly subjective in nature. A person in love with somebody will rate his love interest as the most beautiful object ever designed and surprisingly the effect is real (I needn't invoke any personal experience as anybody who has ever been in love will attest to it). Same goes for besotted parents regarding their children. But such highly personal reasons are not the object of current investigation. I want to talk about the factors which apply for a very large section of the population and which in general has a societal sanction. This societal sanction is the object of my study but before that let me discuss some (largely) biological factors.

1. Fertility / Virility. Anything that is associated with greater mateability/parentability and/or indicates better health/genes viz symmetric faces/bodies, proper waist/hip ratio, ample breasts, smoothness of skin, etc etc ... all these only underline the primarily sexual nature of beauty perception and is obvious to all.
2. Conformance to the Average. In any society a face/body which does not deviate too far from the average is usually considered beautiful. This has strong evolutionary underpinnings - since most of the surviving adults are likely to harbor good genes (otherwise they would have perished in womb / childhood), so large deviations from average shape/size must indicate faulty genes.
3. Relative Rarity. This one is in some sense opposite to the 2nd factor and is more complicated. These rarities are also deviations from average but not in the direction of deformity. I am referring to biological rarity in a *small group* like most curvaceous / shapely / buxom / beautiful voice / etc. These relatively rare attributes are almost always judged beautiful as their fertility/virility is *better* than average. How do we subconsciously judge some deviations as good versus others as bad is a fascinating subject of study itself. There are other rarities like green/blue eyes whose status as *beautiful* simply flummoxes me.

Now allow me to turn the spotlight on the societal / cultural factors, which due to its ever changing dynamics are much more interesting and often reveals unknown facets of our own personality.

1. Upbringing. Let me illustrate this with an example. In ancient Greece the golden ratio (roughly 1.618) was considered especially beautiful (can't term it anything other than a fad) and all the buildings/arenas adhered to this ratio. And all the ancient Greeks agreed that it is the most appealing ratio. Guess what our modern-age kids rate as the most appealing ratio - the rectangle corresponding to television ! That is what they are exposed day and night .. any surprizes ??? Any wonder we Indians blindly equate fair = beautiful.
2. Fashion. This one is the most whimsical yet extremely interesting factor at work. Throughout human history we have all kinds of rational / irrational whims regarding beauty. The Chinese's foot fetish comes to my mind as a typical irrational fad just as the super-thin emaciated look of today's ramp models. At the rational end of the spectrum, we have the ancient Peruvian's penchant for fat females, (though fat is probably a wrong word to say, as in all probability their beautiful females might just be pleasingly plump) as they are likely to be better at bearing babies than the general starved human population. The archaeological extract of a obese female figurine is most certainly a exaggeration of this preference and may be used only as worship purposes (notice the super sexy bodies of our own Goddesses as depicted in ancient temples - most certainly general population were not so well-fed to achieve those luscious curves). One question comes to my mind : is the preference for thinness today the result of overabundance of food (the reasoning going like - the thinner might better be able to digest in this age of glut, and escape diseases related to over eating) ?
3. Hierarchy of Power / Politics. This is the one factor which I find most interesting and will talk about in the next article.

Happy Reading ! [part 3]