What Beauty Is – In the Eye of the beholder
Beauty is frequently defined as an aesthetic quality of things which makes these things aesthetically pleasing to perceive. Such things as sunsets, nature, humans and beautiful works of art are considered to be beauty. Beauty, along with individual taste and aesthetics, is the most significant area of aesthetics, among the various branches of psychology. This paper will discuss three broad aspects of beauty.
According to George Stokes, the aesthetic appreciation of beauty is one of the most important and essential pre-requisites of man. He further adds that it is the desire of seeing the beautiful person in his or her natural surroundings, which induces the person to find beauty in all the surroundings. The beautiful person is the one who possesses inner beauty and in order to know this beauty, we must first look within ourselves. This paper discusses the psychological basis of this definition of beauty.
The definition of beauty proposed by Sigmund Freud is that the beautiful person is the one who possesses certain qualities such as inner beauty, bodily beauty and soul beauty. Freud’s definition of beauty has many critics but most psychologists and art experts agree with his notions on beauty. For example, when a beautiful woman enters a room, everyone will involuntarily stand still to take notice of her appearance and her act of putting on a show for the onlookers.
According to the majority of psychologists, beauty is defined by the proportionate distribution of desirable and unattractive features of an object or human being. A beautiful face is considered to be the most attractive feature, while a beautiful body is the most attractive aspect. A beautiful soul is also possessed by the beautiful person; however, the soul or the mind may not be considered as having beauty in itself. This is because all the features of a beautiful person can be physical and they are all attractive, but it is the combination of all these features that make the beautiful person, and therefore, beautiful. Physical beauty is something that every beholder may experience in his own life.
However, there are some who feel that even if a person has the face, body, and soul that make up the beautiful image, it is still not beauty in itself. A famous quote by Mary Poppins says, “vain is the vain, and beauty is not in the eyes of the beholder.” It clearly shows that beauty is something that a person chooses and that it is subjective, as to whether a person chooses to see himself as beautiful or not. It also shows that everyone has the capacity to feel beautiful; thus, beauty comes in different forms and levels for all.
However, there are some diseases that actually impairs a person from feeling beauty. Some examples of such diseases include cancer, skin disease, arthritis and psoriasis. All of these have no effect on how a person feels about himself. However, this does not mean that beauty and the appearance of a person are unimportant. One thing that is for sure is that the more appealing a person’s appearance is to others, the more he will be perceived as his ideal beauty. Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder.