Monday, June 4, 2012

What is Beauty?


What is beauty?
I decided to do a field test –the sort of test a curious little alien might do if he entered earth’s atmosphere and tried to get a better sense of the world by consulting the Internet.
My first stop was at Shutterstock. This is a place where people buy photos to implement in graphic design-related advertisements. I typed in the word “Beauty” to see what would come up. 90% of the first page consisted of women. I wrote down the first impressions of what I saw: women, flower, woman holding flower, hair, skin, nude women, makeup, clothes, floral vector designs, women at the spa, facials, women posing. Then I went to page 2: women, 1 waterfall, 1 overly colorfied landscape, women… It was 95% women.
I then decided to go to iStock, which is similar just to see how these two sites interpreted the same word: Beauty. Page 1: 1 sky pic, 1 little girl in a meadow, flowers, women, “family”, 1 peacock feather. It was about 70% women. Then I went to page 2: women, women, women… literally All different photographs of women.
Then it was time to venture over to Deviantart.com –a place where young and professional artists post all media of art including photography, paintings, drawing, digital imagery… Page 1: Rainbow colors, abstract photography with varied colors, henna tattoo, flowers, 1 beauty shot, a drawing of a decaying skeleton woman, a nude woman, a bubble, plants. Page 2: Women, Beauty and the Beast, Pamela Anderson charicature, abstract rainbow pictures, fantasy drawings with young women being maidens, a digital image of a woman with her head on a bust. Page 3: 4 Beauty and the Beasts, 1 girl’s smile, Pamela Anderson again, 1 nude woman…
Then I went to Google pictures and typed in Beauty. 100% ALL WOMEN –mostly beauty shots and glam shots, some makeup.
I take these 4 sites to represent 3 different demographics: 1 the Advertising World, 2. The Artist’s/Individual Girl’s Views, 3. Our Society’s Commonly Held Views.
Shutterstock and iStock seem to focus mostly on promotional marketing with Beauty products. Glam shots of hair, close up on lips, Spa treatments, makeup, skin… all can easily be seen in magazine ads and so on for different women’s beauty products.
Deviantart.com seems to have some level of resistance to the concept of women’s beauty. There were some glam shots as well, but no “makeup” shots or photos that could be used to market one product in particular. A lot of the pictures had to do with the classic movie Beauty and the Beast. Some of the pictures really raged against women being associated with beauty –like the skeleton woman, the woman whose head and bust were on a statue bust like a pedestal, and one picture I saw of a flower coming out of a page drawing of a flower entitled “Inner Beauty Coming Out”. These pictures seem to be more introspective and all the pictures of overtly busty women were drawn in a mocking way to trash that kind of “ideal” for a woman’s figure.
Google showed the images most commonly posted/associated with the word beauty. Some could have easily been marketed for women’s products and some were just shots of beautiful faces –in some ways making women’s beauty seem as if too could be a marketable product.
Maybe the media hypes up women’s physical beauty and the need to associate women with a desire to achieve beauty so they can keep selling products. Most women don’t like feeling exploited and manipulated in that way and therefore criticize and derail those kinds of concepts with blatant opposition.
Personally I’m just kind of disappointed that there weren’t more nature shots. I find nature to be beautiful. Sky, ocean, tropics, forests, storms, lightning, stars, moon… all glorious. I also find beauty in people to be beautiful. There are some people on this planet that were gifted with good looks. Scorpios, Libra, Gemini –that’s you. It was a gift from God, as He often gives many kinds of gifts for people to use. But just like some can take a gift like being able to speak well in front of others and use that skill to reject people and publicly tear others down –so can beauty be abused as a means of deception and manipulation. That’s why not all people who were blessed with physical beauty are beautiful people.
Especially in the case of women, Vanity is an ugly outfit. As is selfishness, lying, narcissism, arrogance, and superiority. These qualities make a person unattractive. People aren’t just empty shells wandering around with masks on –our personalities shape the face we show the world. I think beauty was given as a way for some people to make easier connections with others and gain trust more readily. I think it was also meant to be a test for those not blessed with physical attractiveness to see how well they love themselves. Those who don’t love themselves will never love the way they look and will always be jealous of people who are “more attractive” than they are.
Beauty is an art of God. He makes life beautiful both physically and spiritually. It’s up to people to decide whether to take that beauty and degrade it into something in opposition to its desired intention or uplift it to show the glory of God’s graces. 

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