Beauty
I have to say that one of my worst faults is probably vanity. I've had enough people in my life tell me that I'm pretty to be proud, and enough exposure to the media to be insecure. What a revolting combination. Anyhow, the long and the short of it is I spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about how my appearance chalks up to the apparent norm, and ironically little doing anything to actually improve it.
The benefit of this to you, is that I came across a wholly remarkable study about our perception of beauty, and how technology (photoshopping, etc.) has grossly skewed it.
Here's a link. Honestly, the entire site is worth reading, and the interactive parts easy to use and enlightening. To whet your appetite, I offer up my favorite quote (emphasis is mine):
"Natural faces cannot keep up with their artificial “competitors”. This becomes even clearer when you look at the labels of the rating scale that has been used for the evaluation: Just 3% (!) of the natural faces were rated as "rather attractive" - the judgements "quite attractive" and "very attractive" were never applied to natural faces. However, within the group of morphed faces 30% of all female and 23% of all male faces were perceived as being at least "rather attractive".
Looking at the negative pole of the judgements is even more worrying: 70% of all natural female faces and 79% of all natural male faces were judged as being "rather unattractive", "quite unattractive" or even "very unattractive". And you should keep in mind that the average age of the subjects that were depicted on the images was just about 24 years!
Depressingly, my Mom also recently sent me a study in which they showed that we generally think ourselves more attractive than we really are.
Bah!
The benefit of this to you, is that I came across a wholly remarkable study about our perception of beauty, and how technology (photoshopping, etc.) has grossly skewed it.
Here's a link. Honestly, the entire site is worth reading, and the interactive parts easy to use and enlightening. To whet your appetite, I offer up my favorite quote (emphasis is mine):
"Natural faces cannot keep up with their artificial “competitors”. This becomes even clearer when you look at the labels of the rating scale that has been used for the evaluation: Just 3% (!) of the natural faces were rated as "rather attractive" - the judgements "quite attractive" and "very attractive" were never applied to natural faces. However, within the group of morphed faces 30% of all female and 23% of all male faces were perceived as being at least "rather attractive".
Looking at the negative pole of the judgements is even more worrying: 70% of all natural female faces and 79% of all natural male faces were judged as being "rather unattractive", "quite unattractive" or even "very unattractive". And you should keep in mind that the average age of the subjects that were depicted on the images was just about 24 years!
Depressingly, my Mom also recently sent me a study in which they showed that we generally think ourselves more attractive than we really are.
Bah!