What Makes a Person Objectively Beautiful?
While beauty might be objective, attraction definitively isn’t
What do bees and people have in common? A shared love of flowers. However, flowers evolved to attract insects, not humans. So why do we love them too? According to physicist David Deutsch, the only conclusion for widely liked things is that objective beauty must exist.
At first, I believed this to be quite a stretch: not every insect is attracted to different flowers, and some people don’t think flowers are beautiful. Furthermore, when I think about what beauty is and who I find attractive, it’s something different from someone else’s understanding. In all fairness, though, much of how we view beauty and what we deem beautiful stems from the ideas presented by the makeup, beauty, and fashion industry.
For as long as I remember, beauty contests have highlighted the idea of white, big-eyed, and skinny women being the epitome of beauty. However, it’s an ideal of beauty that continuously moves further away from the characteristics of the average American woman.
And although these beauty standards are increasingly hard to attain, it shows that who we deem ‘beautiful’ reflects our values. Furthermore, it highlights how beauty as a virtue is associated with women and has long been a metric of their…
