Our Perception of Beauty Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Our Perception of Beauty - Essay Example Nehamas (2005) in his article â€Å"Beauty: Skin-Deep, in the Eye of the Beholder and Valuable?† discusses beauty where he said: â€Å"There is such a thing as the beauty that is only skin-deep.   It is the beauty of appearance, what we call "looking good."   It has little to do with personality, character, wit or morality, and that is because anything that applies to how things look is not a reliable guide to many of their other qualities.† This the kind o beauty that people attributes to contest like the Miss Universe pageant. Psychologically in our minds, we do process the information. Nehamas (2005) said: â€Å"The beauty of appearance -- what we can judge, say, by looking at a photograph of a face -- is something that psychologists have been investigating a lot recently.   In general, they show people photographs of faces and ask them to rank them in terms of their beauty.   Since these are digital photographs, it is possible to combine them into composite photographs.   What seems to be the case is (1) the larger the composite photograph (the more features of individual faces it combines) the more people are likely to consider it beautiful and (2) there is remarkable agreement, both within and between different cultures, about which faces are more beautiful than which.† Nehamas (2005) stated that several hypotheses have been offered to account for these phenomena, and it seems agreed that they have something to do with the likelihood of reproductive success.   Thus, he said that the more features a face combines, the more average it is.   In explaining further, he argued that now it is very counterintuitive to say that the average is what strikes us as beautiful (since the people or works of art we find beautiful usually stand out against their background), but it turns out that average members of groups are less likely to be subject to external evolutionary pressures and more likely to be healthy and survive in the long run (Paraphrasing made). Agreement among different groups produces beauty, that could be passed on to others and media could actually do something about it.  Ã‚