WHAT IS BEAUTY?        WHY HAVE PLASTIC SURGERY?


THE SCIENCE AND EVOLUTION OF BEAUTY. WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

• "Turning a cold eye to beauty is similar to responding with indifference to a baby's cry."

• "Our sense of fashion is not the same as our sense of beauty. " Fashion is "amusing and enticing, appetizing, icing on the divine cake." "Not the cake itself." Nancy Etcoff.

• What is beauty? "I cannot define it, but I know it when it walks into a room." Aaron Spelling.

• Beautiful people have imperfections. And it is precisely their beauty that throws their "flaws" into bold relief. Strikingly beautiful faces have minor deviations from "perfection."

• "Trivialities make perfection, but perfection is not trivial." Michelangelo

• Beauty is clarity, symmetry, harmony, and vivid color all wrapped into one.

• "Beauty is geometric form and balance." St. Augustine.

• "Beauty is order, symmetry, and definition." Aristotle.

• Beauty is made up of an eternal invariable element and a relative circumstantial element. The latter is defined by the age, its fashions, its morals, and its emotions.

• I defy anyone to point to a single scrap of beauty that does not contain these two elements. That is, an "eternal invariable element and a relative circumstantial element." Charles Baudeliane.

• Beauty provokes pleasure, rivets attention, and impales actions that help insure the survival of our genes.

• Beauty influences our perceptions, attitudes, and behavior toward others.

• Looking good has survival value.

• From infancy to adulthood, beautiful people are treated preferentially and viewed more positively.

• Beautiful people find sexual partners more easily, are more likely to find leniency in the Courts and elicit cooperation from strangers.

• Beauty conveys modest, but real social and economic advantages, and, equally important, ugliness leads to major social disadvantages and discrimination.

• Research suggests that while average is attractive, the most beautiful faces are not average, but have features that deviate from average in a small number of predictable ways.

• We see frequent fashion shifts and crazes despite their instability and our constant cravings. Fashions change but they never get more beautiful.

• "Beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of introduction." Aristotle

• It is ones' eyes that express the nuances of ones' feelings. The differences in facial bone structure around the eyes is one of the most enduring parts of our visual signature and is as unique as fingerprints.

• The eyes and periorbital regions are the windows to the soul, and the gateway to communication. Communicating attentiveness, intent and state of mind.

• The mouth and perioral region expresses the emotional state, conveying happiness, unhappiness, satisfaction, and dissatisfaction.

• Babies teach us that response to physical beauty is automatic and irresistible and it starts early and runs deep.

• Appearance and reality. "Lookism" is one of the most pervasive but denied of all prejudices in the United States today.

• "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in proportion." Frances Bacon.

• "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." John Keats.

• "Beauty is the flower of virtue." Plutarch.

• "Perfection has no limits." Jonathan Livingston Seagull

• "I like style - I don't like fashion. Fashion disappears. Style remains." Yves St. Laurent

• "A difference to be a difference must make a difference." Gertrude Stein.






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