Now for some geeky stuff.
Here's my thoughts:
Beauty is pretty subjective. If you hang out with your buddies and judge girls, which you have no doubt done before (I know I have) then you will notice that some girls that you find to be really hot, or 'HB8-10s', your buddies will find unattractive or not that hot. This makes me believe that beauty is subjective.
But what about that universal ideal of beauty? Those supermodels you see on the magazines, the movie stars, the tanned, fit girls in bikinis on Miami beach?
I believe this has something to do with
social conditioning (I need to stop listening to The Blueprint so much). This ideal of beauty is socially installed - a 'standard' is created,
a general acceptance of what is attractive and what is not, and we follow this.
Another theory is that beauty is
part subjective and part accepted. In other words, individual perception of beauty is based loosely on the socially installed standard of beauty with our own fetishes and preferences added that stray slightly from the standard. I know that I have some of my own that I prefer - some people like tanned girls, and I do too but I also like pale girls. This is where all preferences come in - common ones like race (asian, black, white, etc.) hair colour (ginger, brunette, blond) shape of face (oval, round, etc) height, weight, build, even things so specific as eye colour. Some of these are even subconscious. If I look at a picture of a girl I find good looking and a girl I don't, I usually can't quite decide what I like about one and don't like about the other (with the exception of obvious differences like ugly girl vs. socially accepted beautiful girl).
If beauty is socially installed, then theoretically, babies and young children should not have this standard of beauty in their heads yet. However, I have heard of tests they did with babies and beautiful / ugly women. They had two pictures, one of an HB10 and another of an ugly girl, that they showed a baby, and the baby always preferred (I don't know how it communicated this) the 'beautiful' woman.
Others talk about the symmetry of faces. If a face follows a '
golden ratio', then it will be considered beautiful. This shows the theory that beauty is a universal constant based on a golden ratio.
Some info on the Golden Ratio (thanks Mr Amador)
"Adolf Zeising, whose main interests were mathematics and philosophy, found the golden ratio expressed in the arrangement of branches along the stems of plants and of veins in leaves. He extended his research to the skeletons of animals and the branchings of their veins and nerves, to the proportions of chemical compounds and the geometry of crystals, even to the use of proportion in artistic endeavors. In these phenomena he saw the golden ratio operating as a universal law.[42] In connection with his scheme for golden-ratio-based human body proportions, Zeising wrote in 1854 of a universal law "in which is contained the ground-principle of all formative striving for beauty and completeness in the realms of both nature and art, and which permeates, as a paramount spiritual ideal, all structures, forms and proportions, whether cosmic or individual, organic or inorganic, acoustic or optical; which finds its fullest realization, however, in the human form."
Some more reading:
The Beauty Illusion
the-illusion-of-beauty-vt1659.html?highlight=
Perfect Facial Construction:
http://www.femininebeauty.info/stephen- ... pplication
http://theperfecthumanface.blogspot.com/
Some people commonly thought of as beautiful / hot:
Those are my thoughts, what are yours?