There is no denying the benefits of being beautiful.
I hear people say that having a “nice personality” is the first criteria of true beauty, but is that really true? I have a few words, words, people, stop it. Stop convincing yourself of this when it’s clearly not so.
I tested this theory and tried to set up my friends with mates that were very funny, engaging and smart, but they were, well, hard on the eyes. And guess what? No one fell in love. While it was a brief study, and yes, lacking in participants, it was enough to conclude my theory that the person who uttered the words “beauty is skin deep” was , *deep-breath*, he was blind.
As much as a good personality is desired, people are attracted to the goods: good body, good face, good skin, good teeth.
Far from being only skin deep, beauty appears to be an indicator of genetic and developmental health, and therefore of mate quality; beauty is a “health certification.”
More attractive people are healthier, have greater physical fitness, live longer. Bilateral symmetry measures beauty so accurately that there is now a computer program that can calculate someone’s facial symmetry from a scanned photograph of a face (by measuring the sizes of and distances between various facial parts) and assign a single score for physical attractiveness, which correlates highly with scores assigned by human judges.
Beauty therefore, is an objective and quantifiable attribute of individuals, like height or weight, both of which were more or less “in the eye of the beholder” before the invention of the yardstick and the scale.
I bristle when people play down vanity as if it’s a bad thing, as if saying wanting a really good looking person is a bad thing.
We humans are superficial. It is okay to be superficial.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Superficial implies that you only care about what is on the surface and you possess nothing beneath. So no, it is not okay to be superficial.
It is okay to enjoy your beauty, to strive for beauty and to appreciate beauty.
But when beauty is the product of surgery, it isn’t a sign of sign or good genes. When beauty is accompanied by arrogance, ego-centrism, stupidity, cowardice or sadism then beauty just masks ugly and being superficial nets you trophy spouse that only brings you loneliness, pain and unhappiness, unless of course you’re just too superficial to care.
Julio, I agree with your comment about the potential (not all beauties are mean) ugliness that can come with beauty and the pain inflicted on the other people who love them. But I guess that’s where the “skin deep” part comes in. Seriously though, have you ever been out to a club or some event with a really hot woman or man and look at the way other people react to them? They do not have to do a thing to be noticed! I mean they don’t have to lift a finger to get things to come to them, or look in someone’s direction, or even talk or pretend to be smart to be noticed. Let’s face it; beauty = more attraction! It is an added bonus bestowed upon an individual who was lucky enough to be chosen in the genetic lottery system. I say lucky because it is nice to not have to initially work too hard to show that you are a decent human being and that even though you may not be a stunner you are worthy of love.
When it comes to keeping a mate however, oftentimes, the beauty does have to have something else going deeper to keep the attractee but we have seen in many instances that sometimes just being beautiful, in spite of the ugliness, can still keep a mate. Who is to blame? The beautiful who knows they can get away with anything or the weakling who is painfully unhappy on the inside but then shows off a happy face because they’re showing the world that they are worthy of such a beauty?