Beauty

Ponder these questions for a minute:

• What exactly is beauty?
  
• Why are everyone so hung up on being beautiful?
  
• Why are women turned in objects of appreciation in those "beauty contests"? and
  
• Why is Beauty multi billion $ industry?
  

I don't know the answers for all the above questions but I know one thing, we humans, I don't know about the other animal take beauty very seriously, but the question why stands there for someone to shed light on her.
Why is Maduri Dixit looks beautiful? where as someone else is ugly? Can we quantify beauty? I remember when we were adolescents we used to assign percentages to girls depending on how good they look, the high scorers and low scorers were sheer walk ins. The problem was the girls who fell in 60-80% category. We fought many battles trying to increase our picks scores. Beauty is so subjective.

"Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder" people have been screaming this on rooftops and top of their lungs from the time immemorial. Lets start a thought experiment, suppose, Tarzan hasn't met Jane at all, and walks out into civilization after 20 years of isolation. If Tarzan is made to sit on the Miss world judging panel, who would he chose? Depends on whether concept of beauty is genetically coded or is a matter of TV teaching us to identify beautiful people. I am sure some one must have done this study.

I went on my own quest to find out the definition of beauty. For a face to be beautiful it has to qualify these two criteria

• The facial features should be proportional to the Golden ratio and
  
• The face should be symmetrical
  

Golden Ratio

Wikepedia defines golden ratio as

The golden ratio is an irrational number, approximately 1.61803..., that possesses many interesting properties. Shapes defined by the golden ratio have long been considered aesthetically pleasing in Western cultures, reflecting nature's balance between symmetry and asymmetry and the ancient Pythagorean belief that reality is a numerical reality, except that numbers were not units as we define them today, but were expressions of ratios. The golden ratio is still used frequently in art and design. The golden ratio is also referred to as the golden mean, golden section, golden number, divine proportion or sectio divina.

Symmetry

Observe this close up picture of Aishwarya Rai, supposedly the most beautiful woen in the world, her left and right halves are mirror images of each other. Look closely and tell me whether I am wrong or not.

I have no idea, whether these notions of beauty are culture related or evolutionary trait, where we tend to equalize beauty to be a sexually fertile and healthy partner? Jared Diamond thinks so, he says that the notion of beauty in the animals is to advertise how healthy and fertile they are.

Now this question, Can people buy beauty? begs attention, according to my definition, one is born beautiful, and there is no way one can buy beauty. Then why is this beauty industry so powerful? No idea, may be the corporations have convinced us that buy using dove some we somehow turn in to those beautiful people who eat chocolates for lunch and blow kisses day and night. If we wont buy they wont sell, as simple as that.

What do you guys think?