Illuminators and highlighters

A friend and I were thinking of how to remove the matte effect after applying foundation and get a luminous look. Personally, whenever I wear foundation, it takes away the shine of my face. It covers imperfections to some extent but leaves the skin matte. So, I tried to gather some basic info on illuminators and highlighters.

Source: http://www.babble.com/beauty/illuminators-vs-highlighters-vs-concealers-differences/

Illuminators are meant to add a hint of shine and shimmer to your face to give your skin an overall healthy glow and to brighten your complexion. They can be used on larger areas of the face and are usually mixed with foundation.

You should be careful when applying illuminators, because it's easy to use too much and to make your skin look oily instead of shimmery. A nice dewy glow — that's what we're after. Liquid illuminators are my favorite. I've found mixing them with my moisturizer or liquid foundation yields the best results. Here are the top five illuminators I would recommend.

Nars Illuminator $30 | Benefit Watt's Up $30 |  Smashbox Artificial Light $27 (favorite) | Stila Illuminating Beauty $38

A highlighter is lighter than your foundation or skin and used to push your favorite features forward, typically the eyes or cheekbones.  You do not want any shine or glitter in a highlighter, and you want it to blend really well.

There are five main areas you should apply highlighter: in a triangle shape under the eyes, the center of your chin, the middle of your forehead down to the end of your nose, your cupid's bow, and above your eyebrows. And remember, a little goes a long way.

Maybelline Dream Lumi Touche $6.50 |  Yves Saint Laurent Radiant Touch (favorite)$40 | Benefit Sun Beam $26 | Mac Prep and Prime  $25

A concealer's job is to cover facial blemishes, dark circles, large pores, age spots, etc. Concealers are generally more pigmented to allow for better coverage. For concealing under the eyes, it's best to choose a color that is on the opposite side of the color spectrum from what you're trying to conceal. For example, blue-ish tones should choose pink, and green-ish tones should chose peach. For concealing blemishes, it's best to choose a concealer closest to your skin tone. Concealers may be put on before or after your foundation; it's just a matter of preference.

Using foundation and concealer really gives you a great blank canvas to work with. But while they even out skin tone and hide blemishes, they also make your face very one dimensional. By adding a little shimmer and highlighting and contouring, you'll really be able to push forward the features you love the most and push back those features you're a little self-conscious of.

Sheer Cover Duo Concealer (favorite) $44 |  Clinique Even Better Concealer $21 Mark Jacobs Remedy Pen $39 | Nars Creamy Concealer $28

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Human face and body as a canvas for art

It's makeup time again.
As I browse through a few makeup related stuff I hit upon this gorgeous pic of Kangana in an Audrey Hepburn style. It was just wow.. It's amazing how makeup can transform a person. I loved the style on Kangana - the dress, the hair, the pearls.. everything.

Today, we are inundated with a bevy of glamorous pics.
Over time I have realized the effort that goes into such a shoot. These people would look so different in their real lives.

Our ordinary lives, with so many retakes and meticulous planning and sets will look dreamy.
It's essential that one understands the effort behind those dreamy scenes.
Our lives are great as they are. One needs to realize that.

On the other hand, it is amazing how one's face could be a canvas for painting. This is art. It's amazing how humans adorn themselves. Clothes - have moved far away from their primary purpose of protection into a huge piece of art. Jewellery, makeup, hair, shoes, tattoos - we've used everything in us to create art. It's amazing if you look at it that way.

Hard wired to resist change

http://speakingmadefearless.com/blog/hard-wired-to-resist-change

Nancy Etcoff on Happiness

From: http://www.ted.com/talks/nancy_etcoff_on_happiness_and_why_we_want_it/transcript#t-8000

 0:11 This is called Hooked on a Feeling: The Pursuit of Happiness and Human Design. I put up a somewhat dour Darwin, but a very happy chimp up there. My first point is that the pursuit of happiness is obligatory. Man wishes to be happy, only wishes to be happy, and cannot wish not to be so. We are wired to pursue happiness, not only to enjoy it, but to want more and more of it.

0:33 So given that that's true, how good are we at increasing our happiness? Well, we certainly try. If you look on the Amazon site, there are over 2,000 titles with advice on the seven habits, the nine choices, the 10 secrets, the 14,000 thoughts that are supposed to bring happiness. Now another way we try to increase our happiness is we medicate ourselves. And so there's over 120 million prescriptions out there for antidepressants. Prozac was really the first absolute blockbuster drug. It was clean, efficient, there was no high, there was really no danger, it had no street value. In 1995, illegal drugs were a $400 billion business, representing eight percent of world trade, roughly the same as gas and oil.

1:18 These routes to happiness haven't really increased happiness very much. One problem that's happening now is, although the rates of happiness are about as flat as the surface of the moon, depression and anxiety are rising. Some people say this is because we have better diagnosis, and more people are being found out. It isn't just that. We're seeing it all over the world. In the United States right now there are more suicides than homicides. There is a rash of suicide in China. And the World Health Organization predicts by the year 2020 that depression will be the second largest cause of disability.

1:53 Now the good news here is that if you take surveys from around the world, we see that about three quarters of people will say they are at least pretty happy. But this does not follow any of the usual trends. For example, these two show great growth in income, absolutely flat happiness curves.

2:10 My field, the field of psychology, hasn't done a whole lot to help us move forward in understanding human happiness. In part, we have the legacy of Freud, who was a pessimist, who said that pursuit of happiness is a doomed quest, is propelled by infantile aspects of the individual that can never be met in reality. He said, "One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be happy is not included in the plan of creation." So the ultimate goal of psychoanalytic psychotherapy was really what Freud called ordinary misery.

2:43 (Laughter)

2:45 And Freud in part reflects the anatomy of the human emotion system -- which is that we have both a positive and a negative system, and our negative system is extremely sensitive. So for example, we're born loving the taste of something sweet and reacting aversively to the taste of something bitter. We also find that people are more averse to losing than they are happy to gain. The formula for a happy marriage is five positive remarks, or interactions, for every one negative. And that's how powerful the one negative is. Especially expressions of contempt or disgust, well you really need a lot of positives to upset that.

3:29 I also put in here the stress response. We're wired for dangers that are immediate, that are physical, that are imminent, and so our body goes into an incredible reaction where endogenous opioids come in. We have a system that is really ancient, and really there for physical danger. And so over time, this becomes a stress response, which has enormous effects on the body. Cortisol floods the brain; it destroys hippocampal cells and memory, and can lead to all kinds of health problems.

3:57 But unfortunately, we need this system in part. If we were only governed by pleasure we would not survive. We really have two command posts. Emotions are short-lived intense responses to challenge and to opportunity. And each one of them allows us to click into alternate selves that tune in, turn on, drop out thoughts, perceptions, feelings and memories. We tend to think of emotions as just feelings. But in fact, emotions are an all-systems alert that change what we remember, what kind of decisions we make, and how we perceive things.

4:29 So let me go forward to the new science of happiness. We've come away from the Freudian gloom, and people are now actively studying this. And one of the key points in the science of happiness is that happiness and unhappiness are not endpoints of a single continuum. The Freudian model is really one continuum that, as you get less miserable, you get happier. And that isn't true -- when you get less miserable, you get less miserable. And that happiness is a whole other end of the equation. And it's been missing. It's been missing from psychotherapy. So when people's symptoms go away, they tend to recur, because there isn't a sense of the other half -- of what pleasure, happiness, compassion, gratitude, what are the positive emotions. And of course we know this intuitively, that happiness is not just the absence of misery. But somehow it was not put forward until very recently, seeing these as two parallel systems. So that the body can both look for opportunity and also protect itself from danger, at the same time. And they're sort of two reciprocal and dynamically interacting systems.

5:30 People have also wanted to deconstruct. We use this word "happy," and it's this very large umbrella of a term. And then three emotions for which there are no English words: fiero, which is the pride in accomplishment of a challenge; schadenfreude, which is happiness in another's misfortune, a malicious pleasure; and naches, which is a pride and joy in one's children. Absent from this list, and absent from any discussions of happiness, are happiness in another's happiness. We don't seem to have a word for that. We are very sensitive to the negative, but it is in part offset by the fact that we have a positivity.

6:06 We're also born pleasure-seekers. Babies love the taste of sweet and hate the taste of bitter. They love to touch smooth surfaces rather than rough ones. They like to look at beautiful faces rather than plain faces. They like to listen to consonant melodies instead of dissonant melodies. Babies really are born with a lot of innate pleasures. There was once a statement made by a psychologist that said that 80 percent of the pursuit of happiness is really just about the genes, and it's as difficult to become happier as it is to become taller. That's nonsense. There is a decent contribution to happiness from the genes -- about 50 percent -- but there is still that 50 percent that is unaccounted for.

6:48 Let's just go into the brain for a moment, and see where does happiness arise from in evolution. We have basically at least two systems here, and they both are very ancient. One is the reward system, and that's fed by the chemical dopamine. And it starts in the ventral tegmental area. It goes to the nucleus accumbens, all the way up to the prefrontal cortex, orbital frontal cortex, where decisions are made, high level. This was originally seen as a system that was the pleasure system of the brain. In the 1950s, Olds and Milner put electrodes into the brain of a rat. And the rat would just keep pressing that bar thousands and thousands and thousands of times. It wouldn't eat. It wouldn't sleep. It wouldn't have sex. It wouldn't do anything but press this bar. So they assumed this must be, you know, the brain's orgasmatron.

7:35 It turned out that it wasn't, that it really is a system of motivation, a system of wanting. It gives objects what's called incentive salience. It makes something look so attractive that you just have to go after it. That's something different from the system that is the pleasure system, which simply says, "I like this." The pleasure system, as you see, which is the internal opiates, there is a hormone oxytocin, is widely spread throughout the brain. Dopamine system, the wanting system, is much more centralized.

8:06 The other thing about positive emotions is that they have a universal signal. And we see here the smile. And the universal signal is not just raising the corner of the lips to the zygomatic major. It's also crinkling the outer corner of the eye, the orbicularis oculi. So you see, even 10-month-old babies, when they see their mother, will show this particular kind of smile. Extroverts use it more than introverts. People who are relieved of depression show it more after than before. So if you want to unmask a true look of happiness, you will look for this expression.

8:38 Our pleasures are really ancient. And we learn, of course, many, many pleasures, but many of them are base. And one of them, of course, is biophilia -- that we have a response to the natural world that's very profound. Very interesting studies done on people recovering from surgery, who found that people who faced a brick wall versus people who looked out on trees and nature, the people who looked out on the brick wall were in the hospital longer, needed more medication, and had more medical complications. There is something very restorative about nature, and it's part of how we are tuned.

9:11 Humans, particularly so, we're very imitative creatures. And we imitate from almost the second we are born. Here is a three-week-old baby. And if you stick your tongue out at this baby, the baby will do the same. We are social beings from the beginning. And even studies of cooperation show that cooperation between individuals lights up reward centers of the brain. One problem that psychology has had is instead of looking at this intersubjectivity -- or the importance of the social brain to humans who come into the world helpless and need each other tremendously -- is that they focus instead on the self and self-esteem, and not self-other. It's sort of "me," not "we." And I think this has been a really tremendous problem that goes against our biology and nature, and hasn't made us any happier at all.

9:56 Because when you think about it, people are happiest when in flow, when they're absorbed in something out in the world, when they're with other people, when they're active, engaged in sports, focusing on a loved one, learning, having sex, whatever. They're not sitting in front of the mirror trying to figure themselves out, or thinking about themselves. These are not the periods when you feel happiest. The other thing is, that a piece of evidence is, is if you look at computerized text analysis of people who commit suicide, what you find there, and it's quite interesting, is use of the first person singular -- "I," "me," "my," not "we" and "us" -- and the letters are less hopeless than they are really alone. And being alone is very unnatural to the human. There is a profound need to belong.

10:42 But there are ways in which our evolutionary history can really trip us up. Because, for example, the genes don't care whether we're happy, they care that we replicate, that we pass our genes on. So for example we have three systems that underlie reproduction, because it's so important. There's lust, which is just wanting to have sex. And that's really mediated by the sex hormones. Romantic attraction, that gets into the desire system. And that's dopamine-fed. And that's, "I must have this one person." There's attachment, which is oxytocin, and the opiates, which says, "This is a long-term bond." See the problem is that, as humans, these three can separate. So a person can be in a long term attachment, become romantically infatuated with someone else, and want to have sex with a third person.

11:26 The other way in which our genes can sometimes lead us astray is in social status. We are very acutely aware of our social status and always seek to further and increase it. Now in the animal world, there is only one way to increase status, and that's dominance. I seize command by physical prowess, and I keep it by beating my chest, and you make submissive gestures. Now, the human has a whole other way to rise to the top, and that is a prestige route, which is freely conferred. Someone has expertise and knowledge, and knows how to do things, and we give that person status. And that's clearly the way for us to create many more niches of status so that people don't have to be lower on the status hierarchy as they are in the animal world.

12:09 The data isn't terribly supportive of money buying happiness. But it's not irrelevant. So if you look at questions like this, life satisfaction, you see life satisfaction going up with each rung of income. You see mental distress going up with lower income. So clearly there is some effect. But the effect is relatively small. And one of the problems with money is materialism. What happens when people pursue money too avidly, is they forget about the real basic pleasures of life. So we have here, this couple. "Do you think the less-fortunate are having better sex?" And then this kid over here is saying, "Leave me alone with my toys." So one of the things is that it really takes over. That whole dopamine-wanting system takes over and derails from any of the pleasure system.

12:51 Maslow had this idea back in the 1950s that as people rise above their biological needs, as the world becomes safer and we don't have to worry about basic needs being met -- our biological system, whatever motivates us, is being satisfied -- we can rise above them, to think beyond ourselves toward self-actualization or transcendence, and rise above the materialist.

13:13 So to just quickly conclude with some brief data that suggests this might be so. One is people who underwent what is called a quantum change: they felt their life and their whole values had changed. And sure enough, if you look at the kinds of values that come in, you see wealth, adventure, achievement, pleasure, fun, be respected, before the change, and much more post-materialist values after. Women had a whole different set of value shifts. But very similarly, the only one that survived there was happiness. They went from attractiveness and happiness and wealth and self-control to generosity and forgiveness.

13:49 I end with a few quotes. "There is only one question: How to love this world?" And Rilke, "If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself. Tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches." "First, say to yourself what you would be. Then do what you have to do."

Multiple personality disorder

Multiple personality disorder is not a disorder. It's our way of coping with people who do not accept us as we are. We wear different masks to blend into the multiple backgrounds.
When the masks become more overpowering than the person wearing the mask, probably it tends towards disorder. Otherwise, all of us have MPD to some extent.

Why this post? I saw a pic of Halle Berry reading a book on MPD.

Foregoing the advantages of beauty

As seen in some previous posts there are huge debates on beauty and how it is a form of status, etc.


What do you miss if you are not in that bandwagon? I'm trying to guess.
a) Some (or a lot of) attention by the opposite sex.
b) Few freebies as told by Cameroon Russell.
c) A little quicker rise in the office.
d) Better chances of being hired.
e) More random people are likely to help you if you need help.
f) A lot of beautiful photos to upload on social media.
g) Clothes which look gorgeous on you. (jewellery and makeup included).
h) Better acknowledged at parties.
i) A good chance at finding a good looking, romantic partner.

Also there are 2 types of beauties.
Some people are beauties without any specific talent or brains.
Some are so lucky, they are talented as well.

The former people are dealt with easily by the society. You have to just find some faults and keep gossiping, in an effort to bring down their perceived value.
The second lot is difficult to deal with, especially since they are talented. So you keep telling yourself that these ones are "gifted" or have "undue advantage" and that is why they are successful. You simply deny that they have talent because that is too much to take. You cannot accept that they won the genetic lottery and the talent lottery. That is horrible. Such people should not exist. So, you throw barbs and prick them at every possible event. You try to silence them, undermine them. Do whatever.

These problems exist for any talent. If someone has something that we'd like to have, it gives rise to jealousy. But, how does one deal with jealousy?
The practical ones keep improving themselves. They hone their skills so that someday, they will be the best in their field.
The crooked ones will conjure up new reasons to dig graves for others.

But, beauty, presents a little unique problem. You cannot buy it with hardwork or money. Usually you are born with it and you need to accept it. But, plastic surgery probably changed the whole table. It made people aspirational. It promised to make everyone beautiful. But to a majority of the people, it is an unfair thing. Something that is of value but it cannot be got with hardwork and money. So, it irritates them probably. Some people are not even aware that they are irritated with this fact. It causes them to behave badly.

After reading all the articles, I understand that it is such a biologically tied thing. All these hard wired stuff are really hard to let go. They affect us in ways unknown to us..

So, if one is indeed affected by things outside of one's control, we need to find innovative solutions.

Jim Carey's beautiful message

Social ease

I learnt a new word today; social ease.

When I googled, I got this beautiful article on how to be at social ease!
http://www.rawfoodexplained.com/socializing-and-natural-hygiene/how-to-be-socially-at-ease.html

Cool!
Kinda touches on all the points that I have arbitrarily written about - the need to feel superior, be equal. Nice. When we observe and reflect, a lot of facts about the world present themselves to us.

The beauty debate

The whole issue of beauty, appreciating beauty, wanting beauty started off as a biological one and has now turned into a full blown obsession.

I learnt some valuable concepts from these articles.

Beauty is like a currency and beauty is a form of status.

The things people do, for good looking people, is amazing, even when they never get to see the recipient.

We are so easily persuaded that beauty can be attained with hard work and money.

Good looking people enjoy a lot of little advantages all over their lives.

The general well being of good looking people is almost the same or very marginally better than others. Overall life satisfaction wise, beauty has no impact.

How to Enjoy Beauty Rather Than Envy It

Dealing with the advantages that beauty brings.

Published on January 12, 2012 by Vivian Diller, Ph.D. in Face It

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Leslie, a 30-year-old lawyer, walked into her first partner meeting and heads turned. She had a tendency to catch people's eyes -- being 5'8", shapely and stylish -- so today was no different. Apprehensive about the case she planned to present, Leslie felt encouraged by the reactions she sensed in the room. One partner stood up to shake her hand and another asked if she wanted some water. Most everyone appeared to welcome her presence. Two-thirds of the partners were men. All were older than Leslie by at least 5 years.Whether it's natural beauty, an air of confidence, or a sense of style, some people just have "it": that ability to attract attention in a positive way. Why does it happen? Can it be sustained throughout life? And how does it make us feel -- whether we have "it" or not?
Harvard sociologist Dr. Nancy Etcoff traces the ability to grab other people's attention to its biological roots. In Survival of the Prettiest, she makes the case that we -- meaning both men and women -- are genetically programmed to be attracted to good looks. For hundreds of thousands of years, she says, men have found youthful, voluptuous women appealing because they signal potential fertility and fecundity. Women are attracted to men who are tall, dark and handsome because these qualities suggest virility, strength and the ability to protect a family. "What was biologically advantageous," she writes, has become our "aesthetic preference."

Anthropologist and human behavior expert Dr. Helen Fischer offers neuroscientific evidence that supports this head-turning behavior. She examined brain scans from subjects who were exposed to visual imagery during various stages of love and attraction. While there were differences between the fMRIs of men and women, both showed significantly greater activity after viewing attractive versus unattractive stimuli. Interpersonal attraction, Fisher concluded, is not only measurable, but an undeniable neurological phenomenon.
And this attraction to beauty begins early in life. A study by British developmental psychologist Dr. Alan Slater showed that infants stare significantly longer at faces with symmetrical features, big eyes, set wide apart in round, less angular faces -- a preference that appears to cross race and culture. While we may expect good looks to matter more in developed countries with large media influences, findings show that even greater value is placed on physical beauty in socioeconomically depressed areas where beauty is closely connected to health care and longevity.
The ugly truth? Beauty is unfair. People born with a particular set of genes, who maintain their health, good grooming habits and develop strong social skills are likely to grow into adults that have the "it" quality. And while one asset without the other doesn't guarantee the same result, the fortunate combination of them all leads to measurable advantages in life that are gained without merit.
Daniel Hamermesh, author of Beauty Pays, examined the economic benefits gained by having good looks. Attractive people, he says, are hired more quickly, paid higher wages and bring in more money to the companies where they work. Even in jobs where we may not think physical attributes play much of a role, beauty brings greater financial rewards. For example, homely NFL quarterbacks -- yes, there are a few -- earn less than their comelier counterparts, despite identical yards passed and years in the league. According to Hamermesh's research, attractive people in general earn an average of three to four percent more than a person with below average looks, adding up to approximately $230,000 more over a lifetime.
If that weren't enough, attractive people also receive milder prison sentences and have an easier time getting a loan than plain folks, reports The Economist in "The Line of Beauty." They found that "in America more people say they have felt discriminated against for their appearance than because of their age, race or ethnicity." Stanford law professor Deborah Rhode looks at this inequity from a legal perspective. In The Beauty Bias, she writes that discrimination on the grounds of personal appearance should be banned. She points toward the negative consequences of what some call "lookism," saying that a huge amount of time and money is spent to undo this lopsided predilection -- citing our culture's obsession with fashion, cosmetics and plastic surgery.
Newsweek reported in "The Beauty Advantage" that 57 percent of the hiring managers they surveyed believe that unattractive but qualified job applicants are likely to have a harder time landing work. And more than half of these managers advised both men and women "to spend as much time and money on making sure they look attractive as on perfecting a résumé." The New York Times added in "Up the Career Ladder, Lipstick in Hand," that just the right makeup can help those without natural good looks appear more capable and reach cooperate success. For job seekers willing to go further -- and deeper -- there's always the cornucopia of cosmetic procedures to turn toward for help. A trend that is rising at a frighteningly steep pace -- a 446 percent increase in the past 15 years -- use of these procedures are becoming more common as a means to remain competitive, not only personally, but professionally as well. In spite of the many changes resulting from the feminist movement, looks remain the key to a positive self-image in today's world.
If beauty and its rewards are viewed less as a social evil, and more as an interpersonal reality, can we learn to recognize it, rather than resent or envy it? Can we derive the pleasure that physical beauty brings to our senses -- the way beautiful art, dance or music does -- even if it is distributed unequally? Many of us enjoy watching talented performers and skilled athletes without being consumed by jealousy, then why not do the same when it comes to those who display beauty. The answer? Take the green out of envy by moving beyond our otherwise egalitarian values and accept the powerful, yet unfair influence brought by beauty.
This of course does not mean we give up on our own attractiveness. We may not all be born with those symmetrical features deemed beautiful -- the ones that make babies smile, and that light up adult human brains -- but surely we can find other ways to look and feel appealing to ourselves and others. Clearly, we are attracted to our mates even though they may not be classic beauties. (Note that Dr. Fisher's fMRIs showed increased brain activity when viewing our loved ones -- whether deemed attractive to others or not!) And we are awed by our less-than-perfect children who we see as beautiful regardless of their physical features. Surely we can find beauty in ourselves -- and raise our sons and daughters to find it too -- even if our mirrors tell us we look different from today's "it" girls and guys portrayed in the media.
And lest we forget, beauty icons today can end up tomorrow's has-beens if there is nothing but lovely looks behind their allure. Leslie, and others like her, may be blessed with advantages rooted in human biology and anthropology, but we know that heads turn for only so long. We all age, and as we do, we all have to find qualities that make us feel attractive underneath the surface and beyond our youthful looks.
If we accept the undemocratic distribution of physical assets and feel grateful for what we have, we can admire the Leslies of the world -- as they walk into boardrooms, down the street or onto our television and movie screens. Jungian analyst Dr. Arlene Landau describes them as our current-day version of Golden Aphrodite, whose allure has been mythologized since ancient Greek times. No doubt, the power of "it" will continue in today's world and for years to come. But for we everyday men and women, what really matters is knowing that unique beauty -- experienced within and with all its imperfections -- is the one that lasts a lifetime.
Have you experienced beauty discrimination? Or the advantages that beauty brings? Tell us what you think about this topic.
Vivian Diller, Ph.D. is a psychologist in private practice in New York City. She has written articles on beauty, aging, media, models and dancers. She serves as a consultant to companies promoting health, beauty and cosmetic products. "Face It: What Women Really Feel As Their Looks Change" (2010), written with Jill Muir-Sukenick, Ph.D. and edited by Michele Willens, is a psychological guide to help women deal with the emotions brought on by their changing appearances.
For more information, please visit my websites at www.FaceItTheBook.com and www.VivianDiller.com. Friend me on Facebook (at http://www.facebook.com/Readfaceit) or continue the conversation on Twitter.
Follow Vivian Diller, Ph.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DrVDiller

Courtesy: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/face-it/201201/how-enjoy-beauty-rather-envy-it
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http://www.powells.com/biblio?show=TRADE%20PAPER:NEW:9780385479424:14.00&page=excerpt

Excerpt

The Nature of BeautyPhilosophers ponder it and pornographers proffer it. Asked why people desire physical beauty, Aristotle said, "No one that is not blind could ask that question." Beauty ensnares hearts, captures minds, and stirs up emotional wildfires. From Plato to pinups, images of human beauty have catered to a limitless desire to see and imagine an ideal human form.


But we live in the age of ugly beauty, when beauty is morally suspect and ugliness has a gritty allure. Beauty is equal parts flesh and imagination: we imbue it with our dreams, saturate it with our longings. But to spin this another way, reverence for beauty is just an escape from reality, it is the perpetual adolescent in us refusing to accept a flawed world. We wave it away with a cliché, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," meaning that beauty is whatever pleases us (with the subtext that it is inexplicable). But defined this way, beauty is meaningless--as Gertrude Stein once said about her childhood home, Oakland, California, "There is no there there."
In 1991, Naomi Wolf set aside centuries of speculation when she said that beauty as an objective and universal entity does not exist. "Beauty is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact." According to Wolf, the images we see around us are based on a myth. Their beauty is like the tales of Aphrodite, the judgment of Paris, and the apple of discord: made up. Beauty is a convenient fiction used by multibillion-dollar industries that create images of beauty and peddle them as opium for the female masses. Beauty ushers women to a place where men want them, out of the power structure. Capitalism and the patriarchy define beauty for cultural consumption, and plaster images of beauty everywhere to stir up envy and desire. The covetousness they inspire serves their twin goals of making money and preserving the status quo.
Many intellectuals would have us believe that beauty is inconsequential. Since it explains nothing, solves nothing, and teaches us nothing, it should not have a place in intellectual discourse. And we are supposed to breathe a collective sigh of relief. After all, the concept of beauty has become an embarrassment.
But there is something wrong with this picture. Outside the realm of ideas, beauty rules. Nobody has stopped looking at it, and no one has stopped enjoying the sight. Turning a cold eye to beauty is as easy as quelling physical desire or responding with indifference to a baby's cry. We can say that beauty is dead, but all that does is widen the chasm between the real world and our understanding of it.
Before beauty sinks any deeper, let me reel it in for closer examination. Suggesting that men on Madison Avenue have Svengali-like powers to dictate women's behavior and preferences, and can define their sense of beauty, is tantamount to saying that women are not only powerless but mindless. On the contrary, isn't it possible that women cultivate beauty and use the beauty industry to optimize the power beauty brings? Isn't the problem that women often lack the opportunity to cultivate their other assets, not that they can cultivate beauty?
As we will see, Madison Avenue cleverly exploits universal preferences but it does not create them, any more than Walt Disney created our fondness for creatures with big eyes and little limbs, or Coca-Cola or McDonald's created our cravings for sweet or fatty foods. Advertisers and businessmen help to define what adornments we wear and find beautiful, but I will show that this belongs to our sense of fashion, which is not the same thing as our sense of beauty. Fashion is what Charles Baudelaire described as "the amusing, enticing, appetizing icing on the divine cake," not the cake itself.
The media channel desire and narrow the bandwidth of our preferences. A crowd-pleasing image becomes a mold, and a beauty is followed by her imitator, and then by the imitator of her imitator. Marilyn Monroe was such a crowd pleaser that she's been imitated by everyone from Jayne Mansfield to Madonna. Racism and class snobbery are reflected in images of beauty, although beauty itself is indifferent to race and thrives on diversity. As Darwin wrote, "If everyone were cast in the same mold, there would be no such thing as beauty."
Part of the backlash against beauty grew out of concern that the pursuit of beauty had reached epic proportions, and that this is a sign of a diseased culture. When we examine the historical and anthropological literature we will discover that, throughout human history, people have scarred, painted, pierced, padded, stiffened, plucked, and buffed their bodies in the name of beauty. When Darwin traveled on the Beagle in the nineteenth century, he found a universal "passion for ornament," often involving sacrifice and suffering that was "wonderfully great."
We allow that violence is done to the body among "primitive" cultures or that it was done by ancient societies, but we have yet to realize that beauty brings out the primitive in every person. During 1996 a reported 696,904 Americans underwent voluntary aesthetic surgery that involved tearing or burning their skin, shucking their fat, or implanting foreign materials. Before the FDA limited silicone gel implants in 1992, four hundred women were getting them every day. Breast implants were once the province of porn stars; they are now the norm for Hollywood actresses, and no longer a rarity for the housewife.
These drastic procedures are done not to correct deformities but to improve aesthetic details. Kathy Davis, a professor at the University of Utrecht, watched as more than fifty people tried to persuade surgeons in the Netherlands to alter their appearance. Except for a man with a "cauliflower nose," she was unable to anticipate which feature they wanted to alter just by looking at them. She wrote, "I found myself astounded that anyone could be willing to undergo such drastic measures for what seemed to me such a minor imperfection." But there is no such thing as a minor imperfection when it comes to the face or body. Every person knows the topography of her face and the landscape of her body as intimately as a mapmaker. To the outside world we vary in small ways from our best hours to our worst. In our mind's eye, however, we undergo a kaleidoscope of changes, and a bad hair day, a blemish, or an added pound undermines our confidence in ways that equally minor fluctuations in our moods, our strength, or our mental agility usually do not.

People do extreme things in the name of beauty. They invest so much of their resources in beauty and risk so much for it, one would think that lives depended on it. In Brazil there are more Avon ladies than members of the army. In the United States more money is spent on beauty than on education or social services. Tons of makeup--1,484 tubes of lipstick and 2,055 jars of skin care products--are sold every minute. During famines, Kalahari bushmen in Africa still use animal fats to moisturize their skin, and in 1715 riots broke out in France when the use of flour on the hair of aristocrats led to a food shortage. The hoarding of flour for beauty purposes was only quelled by the French Revolution.
Either the world is engaged in mass insanity or there is method in this madness. Deep inside we all know something: no one can withstand appearances. We can create a big bonfire with every issue of Vogue, GQ, and Details, every image of Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, and Cindy Crawford, and still, images of youthful perfect bodies would take shape in our heads and create a desire to have them. No one is immune. When Eleanor Roosevelt was asked if she had any regrets, her response was a poignant one: she wished she had been prettier. It is a sobering statement from one of the most revered and beloved of women, one who surely led a life with many satisfactions. She is not uttering just a woman's lament. In Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, Leo Tolstoy wrote, "I was frequently subject to moments of despair. I imagined that there was no happiness on earth for a man with such a wide nose, such thick lips, and such tiny gray eyes as mine.... Nothing has such a striking impact on a man's development as his appearance, and not so much his actual appearance as a conviction that it is either attractive or unattractive."
Appearance is the most public part of the self. It is our sacrament, the visible self that the world assumes to be a mirror of the invisible, inner self. This assumption may not be fair, and not how the best of all moral worlds would conduct itself. But that does not make it any less true. Beauty has consequences that we cannot erase by denial. Beauty will continue to operate--outside jurisdiction, in the lawless world of human attraction. Academics may ban it from intelligent discourse and snobs may sniff that beauty is trivial and shallow but in the real world the beauty myth quickly collides with reality.
This book is an inquiry into what we find beautiful and why--what in our nature makes us susceptible to beauty, what qualities in people evoke this response, and why sensitivity to beauty is ubiquitous in human nature. I will argue that our passionate pursuit of beauty reflects the workings of a basic instinct. As George Santayana has said, "Had our perceptions no connection with our pleasures, we should soon close our eyes to this world .--.--. that we are endowed with the sense of beauty is a pure gain." My argument will be guided by cutting-edge research in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. An evolutionary viewpoint cannot explain everything about beauty, but I hope to show you that it can help explain a good many things, and offer a perspective on the place of beauty in human life.
Beauty as Bait
Many people have an idyllic conception of childhood as a time when beauty does not matter. Listen to children taunt and tease each other in a schoolyard--shrimp, squirt, four eyes, fatso--to quickly disabuse yourself of that notion. Children gravitate to beauty. One of photographer Richard Avedon's first snapshots was of his seven-year-old sister Louise. The nine-year-old Avedon was so entranced by her that he taped the negative to his skin and had the sun burn it into his shoulder. Her oval face, dark hair, big eyes, and long throat became "the prototype of what I considered to be beautiful. She was the original Avedon beauty." His later photographs of models Dovima, Suzy Parker, Dorian Leigh, and Carmen Dell'Orefice "are all memories of Louise."
Children are sensitive to beauty from a very early age, but how and when do they acquire their preferences? The popular wisdom is that children learn beauty preferences through acculturation. Perhaps their parents foist certain tastes upon them, then peers rebelliously revise the aesthetics, and pop culture finally fine-tunes it. As Robin Lakoff and Raquel Scherr wrote in their 1984 book Face Value, "Beauty is not instantly and instinctively recognizable: we must be trained from childhood to make those discriminations."
But psychologist Judith Langlois is convinced that no lessons are required: we are born with preferences and even a baby knows beauty when she sees it. Langlois collected hundreds of slides of people's faces and asked adults to rate them for attractiveness. When she presented these faces to three- and six-month-old babies, they stared significantly longer at the faces that adults found attractive. The babies gauged beauty in diverse faces: they looked longer at the most attractive men, women, babies, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Caucasians. This suggests not only that babies have beauty detectors but that human faces may share universal features of beauty across their varied features.
Langlois is quick to point out that infants show preferences for beautiful unfamiliar faces. It is unlikely that an infant's behavior toward his or her caregivers is influenced by their facial beauty, given the importance of attachment to the baby's survival. Nor is she suggesting that babies with attractive mothers have a special eye for beauty. Babies looked longer at attractive faces regardless of the mother's attractiveness.
The notion that infants come prewired with beauty detectors was not the prevailing theory when Judith Langlois began her research ten years ago. The idea that an infant would be peering out at the world with the eyes of a neonate beauty judge is downright discomfiting: even they notice looks? But her results are part of a growing body of evidence that infants share a universal set of sensual preferences. They prefer to look more at symmetrical patterns than at asymmetrical ones, and to touch soft surfaces rather than rough ones. By four months of age they prefer consonant to dissonant music. When psychologists Jerome Kagan and Marcel Zentner played dissonant melodies to babies, they wrinkled their noses in disgust. Kagan and Zentner felt that they were witnessing the first signs of a preference for easy listening and mellifluous crooning. We can learn to love dissonance, but it is an acquired taste.
Babies pay close attention to the human face. Within ten minutes of emerging from the mother's body, their eyes follow a line drawing of a face. By day two they can discriminate their mother's face from a face they have never seen before. The next day they begin mimicking facial actions: stick out your tongue at a newborn and the baby will do the same. Each newborn orients immediately toward whatever is biologically significant, and topmost will be people who ensure her survival.
Babies look almost as long at a person's eyes as they do at the whole face, and see there much of what they need to know. The movements of the eyes and of the muscles surrounding the eyes, the changes in pupil size, and the gleam or dullness in our eyes express nuances of feeling. The small individual differences in distances around the eyes created by the facial bone structure is one of the most enduring parts of our visual signature, and as unique as fingerprints. Automatic face recognition systems guided by computers recognize faces better from the eyes alone than from the nose or mouth alone. Computers learning to detect faces from nonfaces are most easily fooled by interference with the eye regions. This is why masking only the area around the eyes has proved an effective disguise from Don Juan in the fourteenth century to the Lone Ranger in the twentieth.
If babies see someone looking at them, they look back, and usually they smile. Their interest piqued, they will look up to three times as long at a face looking at them as at a face looking away. Unlike prey animals such as rabbits and deer which have panoramic, surround vision, humans, like hawks and leopards and other predators, look precisely at what they are thinking about. This is why babies come equipped with mechanisms to detect direction of gaze, and why the human eye may have evolved its distinctive appearance. Unlike most animals, which have sclera that darken with age, humans retain white sclera all of their lives. The whites of the eyes help us gauge where eyes are looking and give us a good idea of what has captured other people's attention and what might be on their minds.
An animal stalked by lions, which can see prey from a mile away, would not be greatly benefited by seeing the whites of their eyes. By then, it's all over. But for humans living in close proximity and dependent on one another for survival, direction of gaze is an effective form of communication, whether in the form of the predatory gaze, the beseeching look, or the look of love.
The newborn baby's preferences are formes frustes of adult preferences. Babies turn into adults who like symmetry and harmony and things that feel smooth; they are riveted by the sight of the human face, and aroused when eyes meet theirs. The three-month-old who stares at beautiful faces grows up to be the usual person whose head is turned by the sight of beauty and who can fall in love by looking. When babies fix their stare at the same faces adults describe as highly attractive, their actions wordlessly argue against the belief that culture must teach us to recognize human beauty.
The Injustice of the Given
Whether or not the beautiful is good, beauty seems to bring out goodness in others. In one psychologist's study, seventy-five college men were shown photographs of women, some of whom were very attractive and others less so. They were asked to select the person they would be most likely do the following for: help move furniture, loan money, donate blood, donate a kidney, swim one mile to rescue her, save her from a burning building, and even jump on a terrorist hand grenade. The men were most likely to volunteer for any of these altruistic and risky acts for a beautiful woman. The only thing they seemed reluctant to do for her was loan her money.
Answers to psychologists' questions about hypothetical situations may have little to do with real behavior. But when put to the test, at least in small ways, people seem to confirm what the college boys say. In several staged experiments, psychologists have tested people's honesty and altruism toward good-looking and plain-looking people and find that their good deeds are not doled out evenly. For example, in one study a pretty or an ugly woman approaches a phone booth and asks the occupant, "Did I leave my dime there?" (There is a dime in the phone booth.) Eighty-seven percent of people return the dime to the good-looking woman, but only sixty-four percent return the dime to the ugly woman. In another study, two women stand by a car with a flat tire in the roadway: the good-looking one gets rescued first.
People are more likely to help attractive people even if they don't like them. In another staged experiment, an attractive or unattractive woman gave men compliments on their work or criticized it. Afterward, the men were asked how much they liked the woman. They particularly liked the attractive woman who praised them, and liked least the attractive woman who criticized them. But asked to volunteer more time, the men gave it to the good-looking woman, even when he didn't like her. As the psychologists wrote, her attractiveness attracted. Attractiveness attracts even in situations where there is no chance of actually meeting the recipient of one's favors. In yet another study, completed (bogus) college applications were left in Detroit airports. A note attached to them suggested that the applications were given to fathers who had accidentally left them behind. Each had the identical application answers, but each had a different photograph attached. People were much more likely to mail the applications of thebetter-looking applicants.

Interestingly, people are less likely to ask good-looking people for help. This is particularly true for men with good-looking women, but it is also true for both men and women with good-looking members of their own sex (it is less true for women asking good-looking men for help). But as evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby have shown, people keep a watchful eye on who has done what for whom. Our efforts to please good-looking people with no expectation of immediate reward or reciprocal gesture are one way we reinforce beauty as a form of status, not unlike being born into the nobility or inheriting wealth. Beauty represents what writer Jim Harrison has called "the injustice of the given."

The high status of beauty is one reason why it is a subject fraught with such heated emotions. Didn't democratic societies ban the aristocracy and level the playing field? Perhaps this is also why we are so easily persuaded by the idea that beauty is attainable through the usual democratic means--hard work and money. If it confers elite status, then we must make it an elitism based on effort and achievement, not a priori advantage. Historian Lois Banner has chronicled "the democratic rhetoric of beauty experts in the early twentieth century," which insisted that "every woman could be beautiful." She suggests that such campaigns were dangerous for women because they held up an unattainable ideal. Estee Lauder's successful campaigns included her exhortations that "there are no homely women only careless women .--.--. you have to want it [beauty] very much and then help it along with some well-chosen products." Paradoxically, the arguments of twentieth-century beauty experts have often unwittingly linked beauty with goodness.  

Women who were dissatisfied with what they saw in the mirror now felt not only unattractive but lazy, inept, or lacking the inner beauty which was supposed to shine forth with good habits and good concealer.
Happiness
As Ben Franklin said, "Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by the little advantages that occur every day." As we have seen, great-looking people are afforded those little advantages all of their lives, so they must be happier.

Beauty, in fact, does not bring much extra in the way of happiness. Psychologists Ed Diener and David Myers have spent a lot of time trying to understand what makes people happy. They focus on "subjective well-being," a state of mind in which a person feels very positive, seldom feels negative, and has an overall sense of satisfaction with life. Ed Diener finds that good-looking men have a somewhat greater sense of well-being and feel a bit happier than other men. A woman's beauty sometimes makes her a bit happier than other women, but it can also make her more unhappy. The overall effect for both sexes is marginal. The biggest effect is on satisfaction with one's romantic life. Here the good-looking are happier. But somehow this does not lead to greater overall life satisfaction.
Why doesn't beauty, that brings so many advantages, bring more happiness? Diener and Myers believe that happiness has more to do with personal qualities such as optimism, a sense of personal control, self-esteem, ability to tolerate frustration, and feelings of comfort with and affection for people than with looks or money. They note that it is human nature to keep adjusting expectations according to circumstances--the more we get, the more we want since we are always comparing ourselves with people who have more. As psychologist Timothy Miller observes, "No instinct tells us that we have accumulated enough status, wealth, or love.... To the contrary--such an instinctive mechanism would contradict the basic principles of evolution." The good-looking compare themselves with the even better-looking, the rich with the even richer. Automatically running after what you don't have (yet) may give you a competitive edge, but taken to unreasonable extremes, it can lead to lack of self-acceptance and lack of joy
. The key to happiness is being able to occasionally override the more-is-better attitude and appreciate and feel gratitude for what you have.
Desire is unquenchable. The psychoanalyst Edith Jacobson has written about beautiful female patients isolated by their beauty. Catered to all of their lives, they become convinced that they can get whatever they want and whomever they want, a stance bound to lead to frustration at each rebuff and setback. As Betrand Russell wrote, "He forgets that to be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness."
Studies of twins suggest that happiness may be partly under the control of the genes. Behavioral geneticist David Lykken studied fifteen hundred pairs of twins, comparing identical twins who share one hundred percent of their genes to fraternal twins, who are no more similar genetically than other siblings. Lykken and coauthor Auke Tellegen concluded that people are born with a "set point" for happiness, an equilibrium point to which their mood returns after brief fluctuations. In other words, some people will have natural tendencies to worry or brood while others will be sanguine. On a recent episode of the Charlie Rose show, the host chided actor Liam Neeson for not "being on top of the world. How," he asked, "could you not be ecstatically happy, given your career success, your marriage, your life?" Neeson did not say he was unhappy, but just that he was a worrier. The many happy turns in his life had not changed that.
And there is self-esteem, one ingredient of happiness that is more tightly linked to how we see ourselves than to how others see us. As Eleanor Roosevelt remarked, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." Our beauty as others judge it is linked to social ease, but it is not linked strongly to self-esteem. Even if others think we are beautiful, we may not if we are constantly comparing ourselves to the even more beautiful. But our beauty as we see it is linked to self-esteem. Ed Diener speculates that "it seems plausible that happier people tend to perceive themselves as somewhat more attractive than objective ratings might indicate." Happier individuals also enhance their appearance more with clothing, makeup, jewelry, and so on than do unhappy people, thereby maximizing their assets.
Beauty has a downside. People assume that the beautiful may make less faithful partners and may be more likely to seek a divorce. Beautiful women may be seen as less likely to make good mothers, and beautiful men may get questioned about their sexual orientation, no matter what their preference. And beauty can be damn distracting. William Butler Yeats apologized to Anne Gregory: "Only God, my dear, could love you for yourself alone, and not your yellow hair."
When people judge integrity, sensitivity, and concern for others from facial appearance, beauty has little power. A face radiating kindness and sympathy may not be beautiful, and a beautiful face may look aloof, blank, haughty, or self-absorbed without losing its beauty. As Montaigne said, "There are propitious physiognomies; and in a crowd of enemies all unknown to you, you will immediately pick one rather than another to whom you surrender and to whom you will entrust your life and not precisely from considerations of beauty." But even Montaigne concludes, "A face is a poor guarantee; nevertheless it deserves some consideration." Beauty may bring small advantages, even here.
But the downsides are not inconsiderable, particularly for a woman. She may be favored in a million small ways but if what's important to her is to be seen as a good mother, to succeed in a high-level profession, and to be honored for her kindness and integrity, beauty may either be irrelevant or it may even interfere with her chances to be seen as she is, and wants to be. Beauty is not a sure road to happiness.
Despite all this, no one offered a chance to be more beautiful would turn it down. As vaudeville star Sophie Tucker once said, "I've been poor and I've been rich and rich is better."