1. 7/1/13
The Science of Beauty | Brain Pickings
Se arch
The Science of Beauty
by Maria Popova
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“Attitudes toward beauty are entwined with our deepest
conflicts surrounding flesh and spirit.”
“That is the best part of beauty, which a picture
cannot express,” Francis Bacon observed in his
essay on the subject. And yet for as far back as
humanity can peer into the past, we’ve
attempted again and again to capture and define
beauty. For Indian philosopher Tagore, beauty
was the Truth of eternity. For Richard Feynman,
it was the mesmerism of complexity. For E. B.
White, it was the power of simplicity. For the
influential early art theorist Denman Waldo
Ross, it was a supreme instance of order. For
legendary philosopher Denis Dutton, it was “a
gift handed down from the intelligent skills and
rich emotional lives of our most ancient
ancestors.” But despite all these metaphysical explanations, we continue to
strive for a concrete, tangible, material answer.
That’s precisely what Harvard’s Nancy Etcoff sets out to unearth in Survival of
the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (public library) — an inquiry into what we
find beautiful and why that frames beauty as “the workings of a basic instinct”
and explores such fascinating facets of the subject as our evolutionary wiring,
the ubiquitous response to beauty across human cultures, and the universal
qualities in people that evoke this response.
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2. 7/1/13
The Science of Beauty | Brain Pickings
Etcoff begins by confronting our intellectual apologism for the cult of beauty:
Many intellectuals would have us believe that beauty is
inconsequential. Since it explains nothing, solves nothing,
and teaches us nothing, it should not have a place in
intellectual discourse. And we are supposed to breathe a
collective sigh of relief. After all, the concept of beauty has
become an embarrassment.
But there is something wrong with this picture. Outside the
realm of ideas, beauty rules. Nobody has stopped looking at
it, and no one has stopped enjoying the sight. Turning a cold
eye to beauty is as easy as quelling physical desire or
responding with indifference to a baby’s cry. We can say
that beauty is dead, but all that does is widen the chasm
between the real world and our understanding of it.
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3. 7/1/13
The Science of Beauty | Brain Pickings
Etcoff admonishes against confusing beauty with all the manufactured — and
industriously exploited — stand-ins for it:
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Madison Avenue cleverly exploits universal preferences but it
does not create them, any more than Walt Disney created
our fondness for creatures with big eyes and little limbs, or
Coca-Cola or McDonald’s created our cravings for sweet or
fatty foods. Advertisers and businessmen help to define what
adornments we wear and find beautiful, but … this belongs
to our sense of fashion, which is not the same thing as our
sense of beauty.
“If everyone were cast in the same mould, there would be no such thing as
beauty,” Darwin famously reflected, and Etcoff echoes his admonition in
turning to the menacing domino effect of this proposition in action and what it
robs us of:
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The media channel desire and narrow the bandwidth of our
preferences. A crowd-pleasing image becomes a mold, and a
beauty is followed by her imitator, and then by the imitator of
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4. 7/1/13
The Science of Beauty | Brain Pickings
her imitator. Marilyn Monroe was such a crowd pleaser that
she’s been imitated by everyone from Jayne Mansfield to
Madonna. Racism and class snobbery are reflected in images
of beauty, although beauty itself is indifferent to race and
thrives on diversity.
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One of the most fascinating aspects of beauty, however, is how bound it is with
judgment, and self-judgment in particular. One of the products of our
narcissistic bias, Etcoff argues, is that we greatly exaggerate the minute
fluctuations in our outward appearance:
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To the outside world we vary in small ways from our best
hours to our worst. In our mind’s eye, however, we undergo
a kaleidoscope of changes, and a bad hair day, a blemish, or
an added pound undermines our confidence in ways that
equally minor fluctuations in our moods, our strength, or
our mental agility usually do not.
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5. 7/1/13
The Science of Beauty | Brain Pickings
Equally, we direct our real-time assessments of appearance towards others:
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We are always sizing up other people’s looks: our beauty
detectors never close up shop and call it a day. We notice
the attractiveness of each face we see as automatically as
we register whether or not they look familiar. Beauty
detectors scan the environment like radar: we can see a face
for a fraction of a second (150 msec. in one psychology
experiment) and rate its beauty, even give it the same rating
we would give it on longer inspection. Long after we forget
many important details about a person, our initial response
stays in our memory.
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She traces the cross-cultural, age-old extremes to which people go for “beauty”
— or, really, for control of those judgments, whether by self or others:
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In Brazil there are more Avon ladies than members of the
army. In the United States more money is spent on beauty
than on education or social services. Tons of makeup—1,484
tubes of lipstick and 2,055 jars of skin care products—are
sold every minute. During famines, Kalahari bushmen in
Africa still use animal fats to moisturize their skin, and in 1715
riots broke out in France when the use of flour on the hair
of aristocrats led to a food shortage. The hoarding of flour
for beauty purposes was only quelled by the French
Revolution.
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But our fixation on beauty is so profound that it even permeates the most
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The Science of Beauty | Brain Pickings
elevated of human spirits. Etcoff gives Eleanor Roosevelt, one of history’s most
remarkable hearts and minds, and Leo Tolstoy, enduring sage of human
wisdom, as tragic examples:
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When Eleanor Roosevelt was asked if she had any regrets,
her response was a poignant one: she wished she had been
prettier. It is a sobering statement from one of the most
revered and beloved of women, one who surely led a life with
many satisfactions. She is not uttering just a woman’s
lament. In Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, Leo Tolstoy wrote, “I
was frequently subject to moments of despair. I imagined
that there was no happiness on earth for a man with such a
wide nose, such thick lips, and such tiny gray eyes as mine.
… Nothing has such a striking impact on a man’s
development as his appearance, and not so much his actual
appearance as a conviction that it is either attractive or
unattractive.”
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(It is especially ironic and demonstrative of the oppressive power of such ideals
that Roosevelt famously wrote, “When you adopt the standards and the values of
someone else … you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your
surrender, less of a human being.”)
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Still, the mesmerism of beauty and its grip on us, Etcoff argues, is too deepseated to be undone by its mere intellectual recognition:
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Appearance is the most public part of the self. It is our
sacrament, the visible self that the world assumes to be a
mirror of the invisible, inner self. This assumption may not be
fair, and not how the best of all moral worlds would conduct
itself. But that does not make it any less true. Beauty has
consequences that we cannot erase by denial. Beauty will
continue to operate — outside jurisdiction, in the lawless
world of human attraction. Academics may ban it from
intelligent discourse and snobs may sniff that beauty is trivial
and shallow but in the real world the beauty myth quickly
collides with reality.
Framing beauty as a “basic pleasure,” Etcoff argues that our response to it is
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7. 7/1/13
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The Science of Beauty | Brain Pickings
actually the sign of a healthy human mind. Conversely, the absence of such a
response is one of the key symptoms of severe depression, one that goes handin-hand with anhedonia — the inability to take pleasure in things that once
pleased us.
Although the object of beauty is debated, the experience of
beauty is not. Beauty can stir up a snarl of emotions but
pleasure must always be one (tortured longings and envy are
not incompatible with pleasure). Our body responds to it
viscerally and our names for beauty are synonymous with
physical cataclysms and bodily obliteration — breathtaking,
femme fatale, knockout, drop-dead gorgeous, bombshell,
stunner, and ravishing. We experience beauty not as rational
contemplation but as a response to physical urgency.
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She offers some exquisite examples of beauty’s contemplation from the annals
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The Science of Beauty | Brain Pickings
animation
art
books children's
books
collaboration
creativity
culture data
visualization
design
documentary
education
film
happiness
food
history
illustration
innovation interview
knowledge letters
literature love
music
maps
The most lyrical description of an encounter with beauty —
solitary, spontaneous, with an unknown other—comes in
James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when
Stephen Dedalus sees a young woman standing by the
shore with “long, slender bare legs,” and a face “touched
with the wonder of mortal beauty.” Her beauty is
transformative and gives form to his sensual and spiritual
longings. “Her image had passed into his soul for ever and
no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy.… A wild
angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and
beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open
before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways
of error and glory. On and on and on and on!”
neuroscience
omnibus philosophy
photography
poetry
politics
psychology remix
science social web
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of literary history:
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video vintage vintage
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world writing
Ezra Pound had a moment of recognition that inspired him
to write a two-line poem “In a station at the Métro,” which
comprised these brief sentences: “The apparition of these
faces in the crowd: Petals, on a wet, black bough.” Later,
Pound described how he came to write it. “Three years ago
in Paris I got out of a Métro train at La Concorde, and saw
suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and
then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful
woman, and I tried all day to find words for what this had
meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to
me worthy or as lovely as that sudden emotion.… In a
poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant
when a thing outward and objective transforms itself or
darts into a thing inward and subjective.”
Etcoff argues that we each possess an intrinsic beauty “template” that we intuit,
against which we measure everything we observe:
People judge appearances as though somewhere in their
minds an ideal beauty of the human form exists, a form they
would recognize if they saw it, though they do not expect
they ever will. It exists in the imagination.
[…]
The human image has been subjected to all manner of
manipulation in an attempt to create an ideal that does not
seem to have a human incarnation. When Zeuxis painted
Helen of Troy he gathered five of the most beautiful living
women and represented features of each in the hope of
capturing and depicting her beauty. There are no actual
descriptions of Helen, nor of other legendary beauties such
as Dante’s Beatrice. Their faces are blank slates, Rorschach
inkblot tests of our imaginings of the features of perfect
beauty.
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The Science of Beauty | Brain Pickings
But as unique as we would like to think we are, these inner templates turn out to
be far more uniform. Etcoff cites the work of anthropometrist Leslie Farkas,
who measured the facial proportions of 200 women, including 50 models, as
well as young males and kids, and asked a large sample of participants to rate
their appearance, then compared the results with the conventions of the
classical beauty canon. The surprising findings, Etcoff argues, illustrates how
measurement systems have failed at producing a formula for beauty and instead
reveal something profound about the brokenness of the prescriptive canon:
The canon did not fare well. Many of the measures did not
turn out to be important, such as the relative angles of the
ear and nose. Some seemed pure idealizations: none of the
faces and heads in profile corresponded to equal halves or
thirds or fourths. Some were inaccurate—the distance
between the eyes of the beauties was greater than that
suggested by the canon (the width of the nose). Farkas’s
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The Science of Beauty | Brain Pickings
results do not mean that a beautiful face will never match the
Renaissance and classical ideals. But they do suggest that
classical artists might have been wrong about the
fundamental nature of human beauty. Perhaps they thought
there was a mathematical ideal because this fit in a general
way with platonic or religious ideas about the origin of the
world.
And yet beauty is a very real piece of the human experience and bespeaks some
of our greatest existential tensions, such as the mortality paradox. Etcoff
writes:
Attitudes toward beauty are entwined with our deepest
conflicts surrounding flesh and spirit. We view the body as a
temple, a prison, a dwelling for the immortal soul, a
tormentor, a garden of earthly delights, a biological envelope,
a machine, a home. We cannot talk about our response to
our body’s beauty without understanding all that we project
onto our flesh.
Though at first glance borderline reductionist in its excessive reliance on
evolutionary explanations, the rest of Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of
Beauty goes on demonstrate why science and philosophy need each other and
how the social sciences fit into the intellectual debate on beauty. Complement it
with Etcoff’s compelling TED talk on the surprising science of happiness — a
fine addition to these essential reads on the art and science of happiness — in
which she explores the evolutionary explanations of beauty:
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The Science of Beauty | Brain Pickings
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