The Perceptions of Beauty

There is a young girl, right now, staring in a mirror in a New York shopping mall observing her expanding waist. There is a girl, right now, forcing herself to run an extra mile so she can eat her favourite cheesecake tonight. There is a girl, right now, lying helplessly on an operating table about to go under the knife. There is a girl, at this very moment, wishing she was the beautiful Heidi Klum prancing down the runway of a Hollywood fashion show. The saying ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ is a complex phrase with many underlying questions. Different people possess different kinds of beauty and different cultures disagree on what is considered beautiful and what is not. So the question remains; why do physical attributes play such a vital role for success in people’s lives today? Some of the reasons will be discussed in this paper outlining the perception of beauty and the implications it has on people’s health, careers, and social development. “The standards of beauty are universal both across individuals in a single culture and across all cultures” (Cunningham, Druen, and Barbee 1997: 112). If this is true, then the standards of beauty would be learned and acquired through years of socialization within cultures. One such explanation is that people from all cultures share the same standards of beauty because they are innate or born with these standards. In the mid 1980’s, infants as young as two and three months old took part in a study concerning beauty. It was concluded that the infants would stare longer at the faces who were considered to be attractive, than the faces that possess unattractive qualities. The study was conducted many years later and proved to show the same results with newborn babies. Another experiment involving 12 month old infants were shown strangers wearing masks. One of the strangers wore an attractive mask while the other wore and unattractive mask. The infants showed greater pleasure, playfulness, and more attachment when

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