Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps, in addition, beauty is in the heart of the beholder. What we see as beautiful in another must be something that we have experience recognizing. Right?
There have been studies where the attention that babies give to different pictures shows that they are attracted to symmetry and ratios. A face has certain symmetrical features and as a race, our focus follows that symmetry and those ratios from the distance between the eyes to the mouth. The golden triangle of beauty. So much for beauty in the eye of the beholder, right?
There is more to beauty as you know.
The eye might be attracted to the ratios of the triangle of eyes and mouth and the symmetry of the face. We need more that simple perfect mathematics of a face to consider the person as beautiful. There are people with whom we may find pleasing to the eyes, but we would never want to spend any time with them. Nor would we assign the label "beautiful" to such people.
So what happens? Why do we see beauty even without the numbers? Even before a person speaks or interacts with us, we see beauty.
This is my opinion.
I see beauty in a person among the varied contrasts between the perfect and the imperfect. In fact, the most beautiful people have attributes (and we are talking physical attributes right now) that run the spectrum from hard to soft, large to small, curved to straight, rough to smooth. Each dimple, wrinkle, mole, freckle, hang of the shoulders, fold of skin, and several others, provide for my senses a feast of sensations. It is sometimes the very contrast between a lighter spot of skin and a darker one, a freckle, or the way one half of a mouth may, in a smile, rise higher than the other side. The more contrasts, focus points for my eyes, and the sweeping continuum of features is what not only attracts senses, but attracts my mind and emotions.
However, this is simply the surface. In seconds of meeting someone, any or all of those "tags" can be changed without us even being conscious of it. A rough and scraggly looking old man may become a down-to-earth, gentle and entertaining man. We no longer see the facial hair, the worn and chapped skin, the callouses and wrinkles as negative. We may see the person as more of a tapestry of wisdom, a picture of ebullient and flowing joy or wisdom. Thus we feel better even in the presence of such a person and their beauty goes up.
I could not end the conversation without focusing on one other point. What John Keats revealed in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is as true today as it has been throughout our history. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"
A person's beauty goes up for me in direct proportion to how real, authentic, and truthful they are in their interactions with others. They can have bad habits, make mistakes, use unwise judgment, and be real...and they are more beautiful. On the other hand, a physically beautiful person can be closed, guarded, wear many masks, be inconsistent, and very hard to get to know, and they become less beautiful. Again, this is only my opinion.
Though John Keat's observation is so much deeper than this simple blog, the very observation of a shared truth in another that I also possess makes that other more beautiful to me. The more points of commonality, the greater the number of associations to those physical "tags" that increase the overall perceived beauty of the person.
The truth is that it is the continuum of physical features, in relation to the spectrum of mental, emotional and spiritual features in a whole, or Gestalt, which I label "beautiful."
One last example.
Take a diamond. Taken individually, each part looks like a piece of glass. The crown, divorced from the facets, is clear, hard, and just plain looking. We would have trouble telling it was a diamond in the first place. The lower facets taken away from the culet, are nothing special. It is the interaction between these simple areas with light that created the sparkle, the iridescence and brilliance of the whole.
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
-John Keats
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