Showing posts with label beauty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beauty. Show all posts
Sunday, September 1, 2019
Monday, September 8, 2014
Monday, August 18, 2014
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
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.
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.
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
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.
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."
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."
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."
Powerful articles on looks and how looks can be a tool for discrimination
I recently read 2 powerful articles about looks.
Two women quoted the same thing.
http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-14880/why-looking-at-a-pretty-photo-of-myself-makes-me-angry.html?utm_campaign=recommendation&utm_medium=interfeaturebottom&utm_source=feature
"Thin and pretty got me free drinks, it got me laid, and it got me out of a parking ticket, but it never got me what this practice has given me: genuine, sustainable health and happiness"
https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8804291116195138612#editor/target=post;postID=6722944717707045434
"I got these free things because of how I look, not who I am, and there are people paying a cost for how they look and not who they are." - Cameron Russell.
Powerful messages about how we and others treat our bodies and the whole issue of looks.
Two women quoted the same thing.
http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-14880/why-looking-at-a-pretty-photo-of-myself-makes-me-angry.html?utm_campaign=recommendation&utm_medium=interfeaturebottom&utm_source=feature
"Thin and pretty got me free drinks, it got me laid, and it got me out of a parking ticket, but it never got me what this practice has given me: genuine, sustainable health and happiness"
https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8804291116195138612#editor/target=post;postID=6722944717707045434
"I got these free things because of how I look, not who I am, and there are people paying a cost for how they look and not who they are." - Cameron Russell.
Powerful messages about how we and others treat our bodies and the whole issue of looks.
Tuesday, August 5, 2014
High heel confidential
Yesterday my friend mailed me, asking for tips on makeup.
It's almost a joke if someone comes to me and does that.
But, after I replied, I read it. I do seem to know a lot about makeup.
The yearly ritual of ordering Vogue, has made me quite a "knowledgeable" woman in makeup!
Also, my recent MAC outings and Lancome purchases have upped my knowledge quotient.
So, I realized that whatever I do, I put my heart and soul to it. That's a good thing.
Yesterday I was researching the most appropriate torso, leg ration and found that long legs makes one look good (Surprise, Surprise, never knew this so far). So, women tend to wear clothes and heels that make their lower part appear longer.
Read this: http://ladyshortlegs.blogspot.in/
Saw pics of women who looked so average without their heels. I also realized how one's body proportions, shape of legs, etc can drastically alter one's attractiveness.
But - are we all made perfect or are we even supposed to be perfect?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/10673404/Sex-and-the-City-heels-The-real-reason-women-hobble-around-in-high-heels.html
So, heels, makeup, clothes - all are contraptions to make us look more and more attractive. To make us feel we're not good enough - we can become great with these products. Look at the millions of useless products sold under this category. Can you believe that there are many pressing issues but more than half the world's expenses go towards making one look good?
It is a sad fact that a woman like me is even reading up on all this bullshit and blogging abt it because this is what I spent time on last 2 days and I keep a track of what I do, through the blog.....Really bad...
It's almost a joke if someone comes to me and does that.
But, after I replied, I read it. I do seem to know a lot about makeup.
The yearly ritual of ordering Vogue, has made me quite a "knowledgeable" woman in makeup!
Also, my recent MAC outings and Lancome purchases have upped my knowledge quotient.
So, I realized that whatever I do, I put my heart and soul to it. That's a good thing.
Yesterday I was researching the most appropriate torso, leg ration and found that long legs makes one look good (Surprise, Surprise, never knew this so far). So, women tend to wear clothes and heels that make their lower part appear longer.
Read this: http://ladyshortlegs.blogspot.in/
Saw pics of women who looked so average without their heels. I also realized how one's body proportions, shape of legs, etc can drastically alter one's attractiveness.
But - are we all made perfect or are we even supposed to be perfect?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/10673404/Sex-and-the-City-heels-The-real-reason-women-hobble-around-in-high-heels.html
So, heels, makeup, clothes - all are contraptions to make us look more and more attractive. To make us feel we're not good enough - we can become great with these products. Look at the millions of useless products sold under this category. Can you believe that there are many pressing issues but more than half the world's expenses go towards making one look good?
It is a sad fact that a woman like me is even reading up on all this bullshit and blogging abt it because this is what I spent time on last 2 days and I keep a track of what I do, through the blog.....Really bad...
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Horrified
I was reading why women like romantic movies.. I wanted to do some research and I landed on a site, which did feel authentic and useful .. till I read a couple O more posts and was frightened beyond belief or even recovery!
Thank God I am not in such a country. Thank you God!
I would have died a long time ago if I had to live such a life!
America is the land of dreams...life there is much simpler compared to life in India or Bangladesh.
But people have complicated their lives.
Look at this guy's assessment of beauty and the kind of tips he gives to women!
http://www.therulesrevisited.com/2011/09/feminine-beauty-is-highly-controllable.html
I am sure 80% of the American population goes through this. What a pain! To prepare so much to look good! that too in order to get a guy to date..
With so much insecurity how do you live.. how do you breathe?
What if this suffocating trend catches up in India? To some extent it has caught up in Urban India. I can see the teens and 20s dressing up so much nowadays..I don't see too much makeup, probably because makeup does not accentuate Indian skin tone. Very few women put on makeup. Many do the lipstick + kohl combo. Nothing more.
The guys also, though visually stimulated creatures, like their women without makeup. That's another plus.
I don't know what to make of such things. I wish I never came across such things. It pains me. Pains me to know that in some part of the world, a woman is expected to do so much in order to get a decent guy to share her life with. Why don't we just be ourselves.. develop a great character and inner strength and let other things fall in place? That's just me....
Somehow I sat to write this post and I could not finish it the way I wanted to. So, abruptly ending it.
Thank God I am not in such a country. Thank you God!
I would have died a long time ago if I had to live such a life!
America is the land of dreams...life there is much simpler compared to life in India or Bangladesh.
But people have complicated their lives.
Look at this guy's assessment of beauty and the kind of tips he gives to women!
http://www.therulesrevisited.com/2011/09/feminine-beauty-is-highly-controllable.html
I am sure 80% of the American population goes through this. What a pain! To prepare so much to look good! that too in order to get a guy to date..
With so much insecurity how do you live.. how do you breathe?
What if this suffocating trend catches up in India? To some extent it has caught up in Urban India. I can see the teens and 20s dressing up so much nowadays..I don't see too much makeup, probably because makeup does not accentuate Indian skin tone. Very few women put on makeup. Many do the lipstick + kohl combo. Nothing more.
The guys also, though visually stimulated creatures, like their women without makeup. That's another plus.
I don't know what to make of such things. I wish I never came across such things. It pains me. Pains me to know that in some part of the world, a woman is expected to do so much in order to get a decent guy to share her life with. Why don't we just be ourselves.. develop a great character and inner strength and let other things fall in place? That's just me....
Somehow I sat to write this post and I could not finish it the way I wanted to. So, abruptly ending it.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Beauty, grace and ageing
I was looking at a 50 year old lady and wondering, why are we so obsessed with ageing? Yes, the more things you try, the more tanned and rugged your exterior will look but you'd have gained an enormous level of experience trying those things which cannot be got by sitting at home and staying pretty. Right?
Why is it that we give so much importance to this face? That's a price models and actors need to pay, for choosing that profession. As normal people, we should have the courage to break free. Instead of endlessly trying to work on our skin problems we should just focus our attention to trying new things - trek, swim, run...whatever.. these experiences will make us stronger inside...and empathetic.. more human.. What's with a beautiful face yaar? Let your guy run behind the next beautiful woman. Ditch him.. You run the marathon. What say?
We should be proud of our wrinkles and aged skin once we're a certain age. Else, we'd end up like Sridevi - who probably has done so many treatments god knows and wears clothes that are suitable for her daughters.. There is beauty and there is grace and beauty can never match grace.We may not be able to become beautiful overnight but grace is something that can be acquired and believe me, there is nothing like being a graceful woman. Time and tide cannot fade your grace and grace eventually brings more people close to you than physical beauty ever can. So, here's too all the talented, adventurous, courageous women out there...Happy Valentine's day!
P.S: Just like a divine "like" I happened to meet an 84 year old lady and her daughter on the road. For some strange reason they found me amiable and started talking to me. The daughter told me "Oh! You're so beautiful.. and I can feel a positive energy being around you" and I was like.. WOW.. Grace works.. I think when we become calm from inside and clear and filled with joy and love..it shows up on our face. Thank God! I got my affirmation regarding grace.
Why is it that we give so much importance to this face? That's a price models and actors need to pay, for choosing that profession. As normal people, we should have the courage to break free. Instead of endlessly trying to work on our skin problems we should just focus our attention to trying new things - trek, swim, run...whatever.. these experiences will make us stronger inside...and empathetic.. more human.. What's with a beautiful face yaar? Let your guy run behind the next beautiful woman. Ditch him.. You run the marathon. What say?
We should be proud of our wrinkles and aged skin once we're a certain age. Else, we'd end up like Sridevi - who probably has done so many treatments god knows and wears clothes that are suitable for her daughters.. There is beauty and there is grace and beauty can never match grace.We may not be able to become beautiful overnight but grace is something that can be acquired and believe me, there is nothing like being a graceful woman. Time and tide cannot fade your grace and grace eventually brings more people close to you than physical beauty ever can. So, here's too all the talented, adventurous, courageous women out there...Happy Valentine's day!
P.S: Just like a divine "like" I happened to meet an 84 year old lady and her daughter on the road. For some strange reason they found me amiable and started talking to me. The daughter told me "Oh! You're so beautiful.. and I can feel a positive energy being around you" and I was like.. WOW.. Grace works.. I think when we become calm from inside and clear and filled with joy and love..it shows up on our face. Thank God! I got my affirmation regarding grace.
Sunday, January 26, 2014
Good looks and the shaadi issue
Too much importance is given to looks these days. What that has done is, alienated many people. I have heard from many that the facebook selfies of these glamorous creatures has left many cringing and unhappy. The average Joes and Joneses are left feeling as though their life is not worth living. While it's upto every person how they tackle this issue, the worst part is, if you're someone average or so-called below average - looking for a partner, you're in for trouble. In today's world, it seems almost impossible to get married if you're not good looking, not well educated, not earning well, not slim, not fair. We think that what is appreciated is the best thing to possess.
Since people with these qualities are appreciated more and can easily find a partner, the rest of us have to tug in and try and fit into the mould. This is how society forces us to follow some ideals, few of which don't make sense. Atleast the slim part - could be attributed to health consciousness.. but many of the other requirements do not offer anything to one's wellbeing but we have to spend enormous time and energy fitting into that mould. It takes much more self rootedness, courage and confidence to not conform to such moulds.
I am sure that in the years to come, there will be a revolution by those who feel left out. If that happens, it would be a welcome change.
P.S: Was thinking of roaming in the sun and doing some chores but the threat of coming out tanned, made me ditch the plan and take an a/c car ride. If we did not have to bother so much about how we look - we'd spend less on parlours, less on clothes, less on shoes, makeup and perfume, less time grooming...that we'd have abundant time for other things. But now those "other things" don't exist at all.. all we want to do is, dress and look pretty. Anti-beauty revolution required badly.
Also, I had to literally keep repeating "I may not be good enough for someone else but I'm good enough for me" all the time, throughout my Assam trip. I also had to refrain from looking at other women who attended the wedding, lest I feel inferior about myself. There's just nothing you can do It worked to a large extent and I came back with my ego and self confidence almost intact. Huge achievement, cheers!
Since people with these qualities are appreciated more and can easily find a partner, the rest of us have to tug in and try and fit into the mould. This is how society forces us to follow some ideals, few of which don't make sense. Atleast the slim part - could be attributed to health consciousness.. but many of the other requirements do not offer anything to one's wellbeing but we have to spend enormous time and energy fitting into that mould. It takes much more self rootedness, courage and confidence to not conform to such moulds.
I am sure that in the years to come, there will be a revolution by those who feel left out. If that happens, it would be a welcome change.
P.S: Was thinking of roaming in the sun and doing some chores but the threat of coming out tanned, made me ditch the plan and take an a/c car ride. If we did not have to bother so much about how we look - we'd spend less on parlours, less on clothes, less on shoes, makeup and perfume, less time grooming...that we'd have abundant time for other things. But now those "other things" don't exist at all.. all we want to do is, dress and look pretty. Anti-beauty revolution required badly.
Also, I had to literally keep repeating "I may not be good enough for someone else but I'm good enough for me" all the time, throughout my Assam trip. I also had to refrain from looking at other women who attended the wedding, lest I feel inferior about myself. There's just nothing you can do It worked to a large extent and I came back with my ego and self confidence almost intact. Huge achievement, cheers!
Saturday, December 21, 2013
HD makeup and more!
Since I have been spending insane amount of time browsing about makeup, I need to bookmark this site. This site was quite an eye opener for me.
Williams has given so many tips, which any of us, facing any skin problem, can use.
Some of the best are:
Williams has given so many tips, which any of us, facing any skin problem, can use.
Some of the best are:
Best beauty tips for healthy, youthful skin
http://williamspromakeup.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/skincare-and-beauty-tips-any-woman-over.htmlHow to make pores disappear: the secret to flawless skin revealed!
http://williamspromakeup.blogspot.in/2013/06/how-to-make-pores-disappear-secret-to.html
What is HD Makeup? Creating perfect skin for studio, film and television
http://williamspromakeup.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/what-is-hd-makeup-creating-perfect-skin.html
I was wowed by the site and the amount of details given!
Hope I can pick a tip or two to improve my skin.
Anyway, the nature cure diet has definitely worked wonders for my skin. With the 5 Kgs weight loss, and all natural - no maida food..my skin definitely seems better. Never looked this way in ages!
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
The MAC kolam
For a year or two, ever since Radhika's marriage got fixed, I have been wanting to check out MAC. Every beauty magazine or online makeup blog raves about MAC products. My initial tryst with MAC was disastrous. Their prep+prime broke my skin. It was too harsh for me.
Despite that, I had a craze for MAC products. So, after a long wait and a lot of introspection, I booked an appointment for the makeup class. I had to wait 30 minutes and in between the session too the lady had to attend to customers walking in. That apart we spent 3 hrs almost, doing my face.
First she cleansed the face and applied the MAC moisturizer. At Rs 2100 it was quite pricey but it felt light and luxurious. In terms of texture I haven't tried anything like it (I am not yet into Estee Lauder, Chanel or Dior - so I am not used to luxury products).
Then she applied Matchmaster 6.0 foundation with a brush. She did one side and I did one. She said I did it like a pro, but I was surprised. Then she applied a concealer on all my dark spots. We just dabbed and lightly brushed the concealer on those spots. Then we blended a little bit of foundation again on those areas. This took a long time - the foundation, concealer and then loose poweder + compact. And.. the face did look cakey and there were issues along the expression lines and the dark areas of my skin around the lips and cheeks look even horribly dark. I was disappointed with it, but I had not expected anything more, so I took it easy.
Then she did the eyes. We chose a pre packed palette. She applied a paint pot as a primer. Then we did the eyes in 2 ways. One was too dramatic and one like a day wear. There were 3-4 shades used...one for the whole eye, one for the brow line, one along the out V to dramatize.. Then she put kohl on the upper/ lower eye line and on the tips of the upper eye lid. She smudged it using a dark eye shade. This alone made the eyes look terrific. I loved what the kohl + dark eye shadow smudge did to my eyes. This is something I decided to master.
Then she filled my eye brows with a brow pencil. Since I have a scanty brow, it looked dramatically made up. Still, we could tone it down to give my brows a decent look compared to the way it is now.
Then she applied the peach blush on my cheeks starting near the ears and moving down and in, towards the cheek. It was so light, I guess I could use it sometimes. Then she used a dark studio fix powder just under the blush area - from outer ears to cheeks to contour the face and make it thin. I could see some difference but couldn't make much of this step.
Then we filled the lips fully with a plum liner and applied one of the lipsticks given on the palette. It did look subtle.
Then she drew everything out for me, which was such a time consuming task. The pic is attached here. The total worth of products she used on me would easily cross 30K!
For once, I behaved smart and shortlisted the products that I really liked and ones which I was likely to use more. Mostly the eye products I was planning to use. Even then, the eye brow pencil, kohl, eye shadow brush, etc was so expensive, I decided to drop them for cheaper brands. These products most good brands make decently well. So, I ditched these.
I bought the palette in brown by Rebecca Moses, a paintpot and an extra eye shadow and that set me back by 6500 (the cost of the course was 6000 so I was happy that I kept my purchases close to it).
Lessons learnt:
1) I don't know if foundations suit Indian skin. It makes us look cakey, made up and clear skin definitely looks much better than make up. That said, I want to talk to the lady and see if she can call me at a time when she makes up someone else, so I can see the effect of all these products on a better skin than mine. As for me, I look better off without all these foundation, concealer drama.
I definitely want to see how celebrities are made up. They look so natural in the magazine covers, I wonder how they achieve it.
2) Eyes are something which you can do a little or more and change your looks with. Most Indian women can do eye makeup to look dramatic.
3) MAC is expensive. Their eye shadow brush is Rs 1700! So, it's very important to choose specific products and find cheaper options for others. As far as I see only the eye shadows of MAC are famous. I don't think high of their foundation, etc. The moisturizer definitely is great but worth 2100? Donno. Even the lip shades - I was not too wow...
Despite that, I had a craze for MAC products. So, after a long wait and a lot of introspection, I booked an appointment for the makeup class. I had to wait 30 minutes and in between the session too the lady had to attend to customers walking in. That apart we spent 3 hrs almost, doing my face.
First she cleansed the face and applied the MAC moisturizer. At Rs 2100 it was quite pricey but it felt light and luxurious. In terms of texture I haven't tried anything like it (I am not yet into Estee Lauder, Chanel or Dior - so I am not used to luxury products).
Then she applied Matchmaster 6.0 foundation with a brush. She did one side and I did one. She said I did it like a pro, but I was surprised. Then she applied a concealer on all my dark spots. We just dabbed and lightly brushed the concealer on those spots. Then we blended a little bit of foundation again on those areas. This took a long time - the foundation, concealer and then loose poweder + compact. And.. the face did look cakey and there were issues along the expression lines and the dark areas of my skin around the lips and cheeks look even horribly dark. I was disappointed with it, but I had not expected anything more, so I took it easy.
Then she did the eyes. We chose a pre packed palette. She applied a paint pot as a primer. Then we did the eyes in 2 ways. One was too dramatic and one like a day wear. There were 3-4 shades used...one for the whole eye, one for the brow line, one along the out V to dramatize.. Then she put kohl on the upper/ lower eye line and on the tips of the upper eye lid. She smudged it using a dark eye shade. This alone made the eyes look terrific. I loved what the kohl + dark eye shadow smudge did to my eyes. This is something I decided to master.
Then she filled my eye brows with a brow pencil. Since I have a scanty brow, it looked dramatically made up. Still, we could tone it down to give my brows a decent look compared to the way it is now.
Then she applied the peach blush on my cheeks starting near the ears and moving down and in, towards the cheek. It was so light, I guess I could use it sometimes. Then she used a dark studio fix powder just under the blush area - from outer ears to cheeks to contour the face and make it thin. I could see some difference but couldn't make much of this step.
Then we filled the lips fully with a plum liner and applied one of the lipsticks given on the palette. It did look subtle.
Then she drew everything out for me, which was such a time consuming task. The pic is attached here. The total worth of products she used on me would easily cross 30K!
For once, I behaved smart and shortlisted the products that I really liked and ones which I was likely to use more. Mostly the eye products I was planning to use. Even then, the eye brow pencil, kohl, eye shadow brush, etc was so expensive, I decided to drop them for cheaper brands. These products most good brands make decently well. So, I ditched these.
I bought the palette in brown by Rebecca Moses, a paintpot and an extra eye shadow and that set me back by 6500 (the cost of the course was 6000 so I was happy that I kept my purchases close to it).
Lessons learnt:
1) I don't know if foundations suit Indian skin. It makes us look cakey, made up and clear skin definitely looks much better than make up. That said, I want to talk to the lady and see if she can call me at a time when she makes up someone else, so I can see the effect of all these products on a better skin than mine. As for me, I look better off without all these foundation, concealer drama.
I definitely want to see how celebrities are made up. They look so natural in the magazine covers, I wonder how they achieve it.
2) Eyes are something which you can do a little or more and change your looks with. Most Indian women can do eye makeup to look dramatic.
3) MAC is expensive. Their eye shadow brush is Rs 1700! So, it's very important to choose specific products and find cheaper options for others. As far as I see only the eye shadows of MAC are famous. I don't think high of their foundation, etc. The moisturizer definitely is great but worth 2100? Donno. Even the lip shades - I was not too wow...
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Social conditioning, plastic surgery and borrowed desires
Call it stereotypes or social conditioning, it's a nagging thing. Something that confuses you eternally.
These conditionings rid you of true moments.. true joy and take you far away from the quest for truth and pretty far away from who you actually are and what you COULD have become, had you followed your heart. We follow the herd in fear of being left out or disapproved and lead a hectic but seemingly meaningless life. Every gender, every caste and everything has a certain stereotype. eg: If you're a tambrahm, you're supposed to have a good degree and probably you're a doctor or an engineer. Else, when your parents meet their relatives at functions, they have to hang their heads in shame. I wonder... does it make any difference - me being the 1 millionth TamBrahm software engineer or being the first idli shop owner?
Of late, I have this huge urge to get back to work. I want to land up in a good place..have a certain standing in the society...be at a respectable place. I feel that being educated, I should work for my daily needs. I cannot accept myself being a homemaker, not that it's an easy task. It's more difficult than working for someone, in the sense that there is no time limit for a home maker - plus she does not get paid - plus the society definitely doesn't value her as much as a working woman. People may say they want non-working wives, but they seem to value working woman.
I joined engineering without really knowing what it was. It could get me to a certain distance. At many times I felt that I was not passionate about it. Now, at this age, I have to do some soul searching. The past 2 years I have been trying to see what is it that I'd like to do. What is that job for which I'll wake up every morning with passion? It's stressful, believe me. Having to start over afresh in your mid 30s - is a challenge. I am going to take it up. I know that the path is fraught with obstacles and it seems that a large depressing phase looms right up. But, I want to work to enhance my own self worth and feel confident about myself. The identification we have with our jobs is a faulted idea to begin with but I am unable to break out of it. It should be perfectly ok for someone to choose not to work, if one has the luxury, but I, cannot fall into that. I am not able to accept myself as a non working woman. That itself is a huge flaw. This is one stereotype that I need to break out of. It has destroyed many nights sleep.
Two: Women need to look beautiful. They need to dress up and look appealing to the men folk.
I think these two stereotypes play a lot on me. My life was pretty good, till folks at my previous company so unknowingly thrust the "beautiful women are appreciated more" - stereotype on me. The kind of comments guys pass should make you puke. I clearly remember these folks commenting on a little fat lady wearing a saree. I was so affected by the comment that I was really wondering, if I choose to wear a saree I should be prepared to face such comments. Also, there was another really thin woman, whom they called "peeche se Aishwarya, aage se dracula". She was not great to look at, it seems. And to top it all, the characters making these comments, are not even average joes. What gives them the right to pass such comments? I guess it's ok for women to start commenting on men and make them feel odd like they make women feel. Only then they will understand the pain. I see so many useless fellows passing so many comments on women on the road, etc. You should see their faces. Luckily I have not observed men so much or cared for men at all. If I had started these worries in my teens by now I'd have had a heart attack.
This trend of evaluating women for looks is really disturbing. I think all this seeped pretty deeply into me. It was a nightmare going to work, knowing that someone is judging you all the time. Ignorance was bliss, in this matter. Also, one should not care about what others say. Everyone will have something to say, some nice, some hurtful. As humans we do tend to value such things but when as a society we are so ill mannered and judgmental and immature, it doesn't make sense to take any of the comments seriously. But, I was at a wrong phase when I was with these people. I took these things seriously. Whatever they said about others I applied it on myself too. It has affected me so much, so unknowingly that now it's a menace. I really started suffering from low self-esteem because of this. I don't know when and how I can come out of that. I was doing pretty good till I knew these little facts about men and women and the whole wooing game.
A lot of the things we do, are unconsciously to meet certain societal needs and stereotypes. Even a thinking, rational person does not know when a stereotype is playing on him and consuming him. Society feeds guilt, fear and greed in various avatars.
This mind that I have - is purely acquired through schooling and social conditioning. I have been living in a certain society amidst certain kinds of people who talk about certain things, who read certain books and see certain movies. I am a by-product of these. I am a composition of parts of others. Whatever I have acquired is through these things and now through the internet. My friends share articles, I read them. Some articles seep in and become me. So, this mind - made up of likes and dislikes, right and wrong, do's and don'ts, the right job, the right education, the right husband, the right status.. all are driven by others. Those others are in turn driven by many others. We're all just touching and influencing others all the time, don't we? Our colleague goes to a movie and recommends it, we go and watch. Our colleague plays footfall and we also want to join. Unknowingly we desire what others desire. We desire the things showed on TV/ magazines. These happen subconsciously. Most of our desires are what are called borrowed desires. We borrow them from friends, relatives and colleagues. We really don’t need them. Many of my relatives are in good position in the society and some of them are very well qualified. Many of my friends are in US in good jobs and have financial security. Sometimes these things do play on me. Why am I not like that? Why don't I work like that and earn money and lead such a life? I know that I am cut out differently but I still have this nagging feeling. The safest path concept does hound you often, till you become so self confident to chuck it out of the window.
A wonderful article on mind and how society cultivates guilt at:
http://blog.ishafoundation.org/sadhguru/masters-words/become-a-buddha/
http://blog.ishafoundation.org/yoga-meditation/demystifying-yoga/yoga-and-the-mind/
AND
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/drishtikone/2012/09/guilt-is-socially-cultivated-emotion-a-poison-directed-towards-yourself/
When we were children we used to admire people owning cars. We desired cars and our own house. When people wore costly clothes we felt that was the right thing. We saw people in movies.. rich people, well educated people and we thought that is how we should become. Without even knowing what is good and bad and what is right and wrong we aspired for some things. Even today most of the world is run that way. We really have a herd mentality. We all run for the next money spinning job. We aspire to be rich. We aspire to be movie stars. There is so much glamour exuded in certain fields. We are drawn to these things unknowingly. This is one form of conditioning. During our days, top rankers were admired a lot, so most people aspired to become a ranker. Nowadays the most well dressed and hep person is admired a lot so I see a lot of college goers spending way too much time to look good and dress good. There is a certain peer pressure to conform. Most people want to just conform without thinking whether such a lifestyle is feasible for them or even required for them. It takes a lot of maturity to do such thinking and I won't blame these young people. You don't even realise that you're doing so much to confirm to the society.
I was recently looking at actors/actresses who had undergone plastic surgery. Earlier women needed to dance and act well and look good. I know some actresses who were were ordinary but were extra ordinary actors. Today, in an unfortunate cycle of things, because people started photoshopping pictures, we have very high expectations of people's looks. Many people with decent faces are driven to cosmetic surgeries. I don't know if these actors like it or not. But, yeah they look exquisite, thanks to tons of surgeries. It's good that atleast some of us know the reason behind their young looks - apart from diet, genes, etc. Given their odd shooting schedules and odd locations and smoking/ drinking - I wonder how they keep their skin so great. We mortals, who take so much care and work at ordinary hours and sleep well and eat well, don't seem to have those blessings.
A very thought provoking video about how the media makes women feel inadequate:
http://www.upworthy.com/5-minutes-of-what-the-media-actually-does-to-women-8
Also, a very insightful article by Richa Chadda:
http://richachadda.blogspot.in/2012/04/maybe-we-are-change.html
As for actors, I think some people think it worthless to do such things and probably quit the field. Earlier I was upset with these cosmetic surgeries, but I think it's ok. All of us have this need to look good. Today it is such that any common man on the road wants to look like a hero. If he's not naturally endowed it's not wrong to use cosmetic surgery. Cinema is a visual medium and we are used to seeing pretty faces. You can see the stark contrast between the chiseled features of the leads versus the other cast. It's just a matter of money. How much surgeries you can afford, how many spa and ayurveda treatments you can do and how good a makeup man you can afford. Y'day I watched Ram Leela and noticed how they had taken care that the lead was so well made up and they were presented well, compared to the side roles of Richa Chadda, etc.
It's worrisome that many of us suffer for these things. Now, I am very conscious about the way I look. I was never this way. But there is this urge to dress well. I have got affected by this bug.There is only so much one can do when one has certain skin tones and skin texture. But if you obsess about looks, your whole life you can spend in a worthless manner (worthless according to me). I look at people around me. If you take statistics, I think 1 out of 10 women only look good. What about the 9? I see women in my gym, at the beauty parlour, on the road, my colleagues, people in buses.. everywhere. The 20s and teens of this generation do look great. But the rest of the people are just average joneses. What's wrong with that? If everyone of these women was intenally obsessing about why they are average, the world would soon be filled with worrisome thoughts. It's important to accept the way we look. However we look, if we groom a little and stay clean and dress well, we should feel confident.
We should know how far is ok. When I am surrounded by people who spend all their time dressing and posing for photos, you get affected unknowingly. Last few days I have spent an insane amount of time researching the right foundation, moisturizer, etc. All this, for a wedding in Jan. I know that the people attending the wedding would turn out like film stars and I would feel odd and left out. I do feel like an idiot for doing this. I know that I have given in to this pressure of looking good. It doesn't make me feel great or intelligent or even responsible.
I met this lady at a massage parlour. I don't think she has completed her matric.
I drool over Ileana's heavily photoshopped picture and she so maturely says "God knows what problems she has. You be happy for who you are". These are words of wisdom. I am sure that the lady who uttered these, is an extremely self confident person. She has a mind of her own. She is sure of herself and her education or the lack of it has nothing to do with her self confidence. I wonder... where are all we women - urban, highly educated, employed at hi-fi companies, well dressed, spending a bomb on parlours and cosmetics, headed?
Like some great sage said, we are all collecting fantasies from TV, magazines, paper and ads. They create certain mental images and we start comparing ourself with these images, unknowingly. We try to attain the so-called perfect body or face. It's a never ending game, whose only fate is "unhappiness" and "depression". While we all fret and fume at how "ordinary" we look, the cosmetic companies will laugh their way to the bank.
Is there a way we can stop these malicious, unrealistic images staring at us? Can we war against such unrealistic expectations of beauty? How do you educate a girl, right from 4 to know what 'beauty' is and how only her confidence can save her?
I think a slow movement has to start, to free us women from such horror. I'm apalled that this inadequacy has affected even a person as laid back as me.
Such is the effect of social conditioning and ads on urban women and we all thought we were smart!
We should learn a lesson or two from the rural belles.
These conditionings rid you of true moments.. true joy and take you far away from the quest for truth and pretty far away from who you actually are and what you COULD have become, had you followed your heart. We follow the herd in fear of being left out or disapproved and lead a hectic but seemingly meaningless life. Every gender, every caste and everything has a certain stereotype. eg: If you're a tambrahm, you're supposed to have a good degree and probably you're a doctor or an engineer. Else, when your parents meet their relatives at functions, they have to hang their heads in shame. I wonder... does it make any difference - me being the 1 millionth TamBrahm software engineer or being the first idli shop owner?
Of late, I have this huge urge to get back to work. I want to land up in a good place..have a certain standing in the society...be at a respectable place. I feel that being educated, I should work for my daily needs. I cannot accept myself being a homemaker, not that it's an easy task. It's more difficult than working for someone, in the sense that there is no time limit for a home maker - plus she does not get paid - plus the society definitely doesn't value her as much as a working woman. People may say they want non-working wives, but they seem to value working woman.
I joined engineering without really knowing what it was. It could get me to a certain distance. At many times I felt that I was not passionate about it. Now, at this age, I have to do some soul searching. The past 2 years I have been trying to see what is it that I'd like to do. What is that job for which I'll wake up every morning with passion? It's stressful, believe me. Having to start over afresh in your mid 30s - is a challenge. I am going to take it up. I know that the path is fraught with obstacles and it seems that a large depressing phase looms right up. But, I want to work to enhance my own self worth and feel confident about myself. The identification we have with our jobs is a faulted idea to begin with but I am unable to break out of it. It should be perfectly ok for someone to choose not to work, if one has the luxury, but I, cannot fall into that. I am not able to accept myself as a non working woman. That itself is a huge flaw. This is one stereotype that I need to break out of. It has destroyed many nights sleep.
Two: Women need to look beautiful. They need to dress up and look appealing to the men folk.
I think these two stereotypes play a lot on me. My life was pretty good, till folks at my previous company so unknowingly thrust the "beautiful women are appreciated more" - stereotype on me. The kind of comments guys pass should make you puke. I clearly remember these folks commenting on a little fat lady wearing a saree. I was so affected by the comment that I was really wondering, if I choose to wear a saree I should be prepared to face such comments. Also, there was another really thin woman, whom they called "peeche se Aishwarya, aage se dracula". She was not great to look at, it seems. And to top it all, the characters making these comments, are not even average joes. What gives them the right to pass such comments? I guess it's ok for women to start commenting on men and make them feel odd like they make women feel. Only then they will understand the pain. I see so many useless fellows passing so many comments on women on the road, etc. You should see their faces. Luckily I have not observed men so much or cared for men at all. If I had started these worries in my teens by now I'd have had a heart attack.
This trend of evaluating women for looks is really disturbing. I think all this seeped pretty deeply into me. It was a nightmare going to work, knowing that someone is judging you all the time. Ignorance was bliss, in this matter. Also, one should not care about what others say. Everyone will have something to say, some nice, some hurtful. As humans we do tend to value such things but when as a society we are so ill mannered and judgmental and immature, it doesn't make sense to take any of the comments seriously. But, I was at a wrong phase when I was with these people. I took these things seriously. Whatever they said about others I applied it on myself too. It has affected me so much, so unknowingly that now it's a menace. I really started suffering from low self-esteem because of this. I don't know when and how I can come out of that. I was doing pretty good till I knew these little facts about men and women and the whole wooing game.
A lot of the things we do, are unconsciously to meet certain societal needs and stereotypes. Even a thinking, rational person does not know when a stereotype is playing on him and consuming him. Society feeds guilt, fear and greed in various avatars.
This mind that I have - is purely acquired through schooling and social conditioning. I have been living in a certain society amidst certain kinds of people who talk about certain things, who read certain books and see certain movies. I am a by-product of these. I am a composition of parts of others. Whatever I have acquired is through these things and now through the internet. My friends share articles, I read them. Some articles seep in and become me. So, this mind - made up of likes and dislikes, right and wrong, do's and don'ts, the right job, the right education, the right husband, the right status.. all are driven by others. Those others are in turn driven by many others. We're all just touching and influencing others all the time, don't we? Our colleague goes to a movie and recommends it, we go and watch. Our colleague plays footfall and we also want to join. Unknowingly we desire what others desire. We desire the things showed on TV/ magazines. These happen subconsciously. Most of our desires are what are called borrowed desires. We borrow them from friends, relatives and colleagues. We really don’t need them. Many of my relatives are in good position in the society and some of them are very well qualified. Many of my friends are in US in good jobs and have financial security. Sometimes these things do play on me. Why am I not like that? Why don't I work like that and earn money and lead such a life? I know that I am cut out differently but I still have this nagging feeling. The safest path concept does hound you often, till you become so self confident to chuck it out of the window.
A wonderful article on mind and how society cultivates guilt at:
http://blog.ishafoundation.org/sadhguru/masters-words/become-a-buddha/
http://blog.ishafoundation.org/yoga-meditation/demystifying-yoga/yoga-and-the-mind/
AND
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/drishtikone/2012/09/guilt-is-socially-cultivated-emotion-a-poison-directed-towards-yourself/
When we were children we used to admire people owning cars. We desired cars and our own house. When people wore costly clothes we felt that was the right thing. We saw people in movies.. rich people, well educated people and we thought that is how we should become. Without even knowing what is good and bad and what is right and wrong we aspired for some things. Even today most of the world is run that way. We really have a herd mentality. We all run for the next money spinning job. We aspire to be rich. We aspire to be movie stars. There is so much glamour exuded in certain fields. We are drawn to these things unknowingly. This is one form of conditioning. During our days, top rankers were admired a lot, so most people aspired to become a ranker. Nowadays the most well dressed and hep person is admired a lot so I see a lot of college goers spending way too much time to look good and dress good. There is a certain peer pressure to conform. Most people want to just conform without thinking whether such a lifestyle is feasible for them or even required for them. It takes a lot of maturity to do such thinking and I won't blame these young people. You don't even realise that you're doing so much to confirm to the society.
I was recently looking at actors/actresses who had undergone plastic surgery. Earlier women needed to dance and act well and look good. I know some actresses who were were ordinary but were extra ordinary actors. Today, in an unfortunate cycle of things, because people started photoshopping pictures, we have very high expectations of people's looks. Many people with decent faces are driven to cosmetic surgeries. I don't know if these actors like it or not. But, yeah they look exquisite, thanks to tons of surgeries. It's good that atleast some of us know the reason behind their young looks - apart from diet, genes, etc. Given their odd shooting schedules and odd locations and smoking/ drinking - I wonder how they keep their skin so great. We mortals, who take so much care and work at ordinary hours and sleep well and eat well, don't seem to have those blessings.
A very thought provoking video about how the media makes women feel inadequate:
http://www.upworthy.com/5-minutes-of-what-the-media-actually-does-to-women-8
Also, a very insightful article by Richa Chadda:
http://richachadda.blogspot.in/2012/04/maybe-we-are-change.html
As for actors, I think some people think it worthless to do such things and probably quit the field. Earlier I was upset with these cosmetic surgeries, but I think it's ok. All of us have this need to look good. Today it is such that any common man on the road wants to look like a hero. If he's not naturally endowed it's not wrong to use cosmetic surgery. Cinema is a visual medium and we are used to seeing pretty faces. You can see the stark contrast between the chiseled features of the leads versus the other cast. It's just a matter of money. How much surgeries you can afford, how many spa and ayurveda treatments you can do and how good a makeup man you can afford. Y'day I watched Ram Leela and noticed how they had taken care that the lead was so well made up and they were presented well, compared to the side roles of Richa Chadda, etc.
It's worrisome that many of us suffer for these things. Now, I am very conscious about the way I look. I was never this way. But there is this urge to dress well. I have got affected by this bug.There is only so much one can do when one has certain skin tones and skin texture. But if you obsess about looks, your whole life you can spend in a worthless manner (worthless according to me). I look at people around me. If you take statistics, I think 1 out of 10 women only look good. What about the 9? I see women in my gym, at the beauty parlour, on the road, my colleagues, people in buses.. everywhere. The 20s and teens of this generation do look great. But the rest of the people are just average joneses. What's wrong with that? If everyone of these women was intenally obsessing about why they are average, the world would soon be filled with worrisome thoughts. It's important to accept the way we look. However we look, if we groom a little and stay clean and dress well, we should feel confident.
We should know how far is ok. When I am surrounded by people who spend all their time dressing and posing for photos, you get affected unknowingly. Last few days I have spent an insane amount of time researching the right foundation, moisturizer, etc. All this, for a wedding in Jan. I know that the people attending the wedding would turn out like film stars and I would feel odd and left out. I do feel like an idiot for doing this. I know that I have given in to this pressure of looking good. It doesn't make me feel great or intelligent or even responsible.
I met this lady at a massage parlour. I don't think she has completed her matric.
I drool over Ileana's heavily photoshopped picture and she so maturely says "God knows what problems she has. You be happy for who you are". These are words of wisdom. I am sure that the lady who uttered these, is an extremely self confident person. She has a mind of her own. She is sure of herself and her education or the lack of it has nothing to do with her self confidence. I wonder... where are all we women - urban, highly educated, employed at hi-fi companies, well dressed, spending a bomb on parlours and cosmetics, headed?
Like some great sage said, we are all collecting fantasies from TV, magazines, paper and ads. They create certain mental images and we start comparing ourself with these images, unknowingly. We try to attain the so-called perfect body or face. It's a never ending game, whose only fate is "unhappiness" and "depression". While we all fret and fume at how "ordinary" we look, the cosmetic companies will laugh their way to the bank.
Is there a way we can stop these malicious, unrealistic images staring at us? Can we war against such unrealistic expectations of beauty? How do you educate a girl, right from 4 to know what 'beauty' is and how only her confidence can save her?
I think a slow movement has to start, to free us women from such horror. I'm apalled that this inadequacy has affected even a person as laid back as me.
Such is the effect of social conditioning and ads on urban women and we all thought we were smart!
We should learn a lesson or two from the rural belles.
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Mirror mirror on the wall...and the face....
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/08/mirrors-cameras-and-cultural-evolution.html
=======================================================================
In Valparai I heard a group of guys saying "Magane, andha pic a mattum FB la potta.. Tholanja.. pona vattu jatty potta picture-a pottu manatha vangittaan da. My girlfriend also saw that".
I heard the same things from multiple people. I too fear FB photos. I don't want an ugly pic of mine sneaking there, for the whole world to see... I haven't exactly portrayed to the world that I am a beauty but nevertheless I don't want my ugly pics to be seen by all. Why this fear? Why should I care what others think of my face? Do I fear losing some friends? Of course my closest ones love me the way I am.. but somewhere there is insecurity lurking.. somewhere I am not 100% confident...Except a few people others don't know me... they judge me by the looks.. feel I am too old.. old enough to be having a teenage son or daughter.. I feel bad.. that all the skills I have learnt are of no use. Sure, these people are not meant to be friends, nevertheless it hurts. I got hurt when a guy called me 'aunty' at work.. a guy who himself suffers from balding. Guys so casually remark about women as if they are not living things. In theatres and malls you can see scores of guys judging women's looks and assets and clothes...The term 'aunty' to refer to a woman in a derogatory sense is so unacceptable.. I don't know why this thing bothers me. I do spend a few CPU cycles every now and then, thinking abt this issue. Why should this affect me? I am not looking for a lover.. I am not a model.. why then should it affect me?
Mirrors, cameras and cultural evolution
It's safe to say that everyone reading this has seen an accurate
reflection in a mirror. Everyone you know has seen their face in a
mirror as well.
A thousand years ago (a nanosecond in evolutionary time) virtually no one had.
Mirrors are a big deal. Elephants and primates have been shown to be able to recognize themselves in a mirror, and the idea of self-image is one of the cornerstones of our culture. Hard to imagine walking through the world without knowing what you look like.
Fascinating aside: When we see a famous person in the mirror, our perception changes.
I hope we can agree that in 2013, anyone who gets uncomfortable around mirrors, who says mirrors aren't their thing, who tries to avoid a job where they might see a mirror--that person is a bit outside the mainstream.
Cameras are mirrors, but unlike the momentary glimpse of the traditional mirror, they are permanent, and now the web amplifies them. Do you see how many people pose for snapshots? The unnatural posture, the fake smile... there's anxiety here, and it's because unlike seeing ourselves in the mirror, we're being captured, forever. Multiply this fear by the million people who might see this photo on Instagram...
No one gets tense in front of mirrors any longer. Experienced professionals don't get tense in front of cameras, either.
It probably used to be okay to say, "mirrors freak me out," or to assert that they contained demons. No longer. It certainly wasn't uncommon for cultures to resist cameras at first, and to take the phrase, "take a picture," quite literally. This resistance is also dying out and almost gone.
And yet... And yet we still freeze up when someone takes a picture, we hold our breath before we go on stage, we give away our deepest insecurities when someone puts us on video...
Mirrors and cameras each took a generation or more to catch on as widespread foundations of our culture. It's not surprising, then, that so many people fear social media. It's about us, and when we're on the hook, in front of people we can't know or trust, we hold back.
For a while.
And then we don't.
A thousand years ago (a nanosecond in evolutionary time) virtually no one had.
Mirrors are a big deal. Elephants and primates have been shown to be able to recognize themselves in a mirror, and the idea of self-image is one of the cornerstones of our culture. Hard to imagine walking through the world without knowing what you look like.
Fascinating aside: When we see a famous person in the mirror, our perception changes.
I hope we can agree that in 2013, anyone who gets uncomfortable around mirrors, who says mirrors aren't their thing, who tries to avoid a job where they might see a mirror--that person is a bit outside the mainstream.
Cameras are mirrors, but unlike the momentary glimpse of the traditional mirror, they are permanent, and now the web amplifies them. Do you see how many people pose for snapshots? The unnatural posture, the fake smile... there's anxiety here, and it's because unlike seeing ourselves in the mirror, we're being captured, forever. Multiply this fear by the million people who might see this photo on Instagram...
No one gets tense in front of mirrors any longer. Experienced professionals don't get tense in front of cameras, either.
It probably used to be okay to say, "mirrors freak me out," or to assert that they contained demons. No longer. It certainly wasn't uncommon for cultures to resist cameras at first, and to take the phrase, "take a picture," quite literally. This resistance is also dying out and almost gone.
And yet... And yet we still freeze up when someone takes a picture, we hold our breath before we go on stage, we give away our deepest insecurities when someone puts us on video...
Mirrors and cameras each took a generation or more to catch on as widespread foundations of our culture. It's not surprising, then, that so many people fear social media. It's about us, and when we're on the hook, in front of people we can't know or trust, we hold back.
For a while.
And then we don't.
=======================================================================
In Valparai I heard a group of guys saying "Magane, andha pic a mattum FB la potta.. Tholanja.. pona vattu jatty potta picture-a pottu manatha vangittaan da. My girlfriend also saw that".
I heard the same things from multiple people. I too fear FB photos. I don't want an ugly pic of mine sneaking there, for the whole world to see... I haven't exactly portrayed to the world that I am a beauty but nevertheless I don't want my ugly pics to be seen by all. Why this fear? Why should I care what others think of my face? Do I fear losing some friends? Of course my closest ones love me the way I am.. but somewhere there is insecurity lurking.. somewhere I am not 100% confident...Except a few people others don't know me... they judge me by the looks.. feel I am too old.. old enough to be having a teenage son or daughter.. I feel bad.. that all the skills I have learnt are of no use. Sure, these people are not meant to be friends, nevertheless it hurts. I got hurt when a guy called me 'aunty' at work.. a guy who himself suffers from balding. Guys so casually remark about women as if they are not living things. In theatres and malls you can see scores of guys judging women's looks and assets and clothes...The term 'aunty' to refer to a woman in a derogatory sense is so unacceptable.. I don't know why this thing bothers me. I do spend a few CPU cycles every now and then, thinking abt this issue. Why should this affect me? I am not looking for a lover.. I am not a model.. why then should it affect me?
Kwan stresses that 60,000 years from now, our ability to control the human genome will also make the effect of evolution on our facial features moot. As genetic engineering becomes the norm, “the fate of the human face will be increasingly determined by human tastes,” he says in a research document.
Kwan believes the human face will reflect “total mastery over human morphological genetics. This human face will be heavily biased towards features that humans find fundamentally appealing: strong, regal lines, straight nose, intense eyes, and placement of facial features that adhere to the golden ratio and left/right perfect symmetry,” he says.
If we choose how we look, instead of nature deciding it for us, how will the planet look like? Will it have happier people than today? Then, we will find something else that is not in our control and fret and fume and then genetically modify that, maybe. Are we born to be discontented? Is discontentment the mother of future inventions?
Then we have this:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=you-are-less-beautiful-than-you-think
Inflated perceptions of one’s physical appearance is a manifestation of a general phenomenon psychologists call “self-enhancement.” Self enhancement is not the same as lying or deception. Lying takes a toll on the lier and people have negative emotions when they see people deceiving them. In self-enhancement people truly believe that they have desirable characteristics, they can promote themselves without having to lie. Self-enhancement also boosts confidence. Researchers have shown that confidence plays a role in determining whom people choose as leaders and romantic partners. Confident people are believed more and their advice is more likely to be followed.
Why we cheat - especially through the internet or phone, is another heavy topic which I can read and blog about later.
Saturday, August 31, 2013
Women and insecurity
Why are women so insecure? Why do they feel threatened by a beautiful woman? They don't feel threatened by a smarter woman...Why so?
I am forced to believe, it's coz of the men out there. The attraction between men and women is the reason so many things exist (you, me and the millions of products sold across countries from boob enhancers to lingerie to makeup). Almost all the products sold are either for men to attract women or for women to attract men :-)
So, this attraction is a big thing for many people. They emulate their favourite heroes or heroines, dress up, put on an accent, wear makeup, sing songs and do a lot of things just to attract the opposite sex. Nothing wrong in it. Survival and procreation and extremely hard wired into our genes. The reason a peacock dances, is to woo the female.. all the birds with lovely voices are singing love songs to woo their ladies. So, this attraction exists in all species. No debate about that.
Let's come back to women... Many men say women are jealous. They mock at women. Women mock at themselves. Why do we feel jealous of a beautiful woman? It's most probably because we are afraid that our partner will leave us for her. (I'm not counting myself there as I have never tried to woo someone or be jealous of other girls, lucky me). Men are attracted to feminine beauty. A shapely woman or a beautiful woman is more likely to attract a man than a bespectacled, tangled haired geek. Men are frivolous too. When married men cheat on their wives, the boyfriend has even more excuses. This leads to insecurity. We have to guard our man. We can never be sure if he will leave us for someone else. I have seen so many girls outraged because their boyfriend dumped them for a more beautiful one. They failed to see their beauty and character. Some less fortunate ones could not even make the man of their choice sit up and notice them in the first place. They were not in the list at all. It hurts.. it hurts badly... especially since it's a serious issue for the woman. She is in love with a nice guy and wants him but he just fails to notice her because of this beauty fixation.
Then why is it that men are not insecure? Easy... Women, so far, are attracted to well-read, steady and caring and sensitive men. They choose their men with care. They are not frivolous (mostly). It would be very very hard for her to dump you for a more handsome guy. These things happen nowadays but it's not the norm. So, a guy feels less threatened. If he's financially secure, he doesn't have to worry.
Imagine the kind of pressure this insecurity puts on women! They spend a fortune trying to look beautiful. Most women I know dedicate their entire lives to choosing colorful clothes, wearing them, choosing makeup, wearing makeup, visiting parlours (I too go for my pedicure and hair color), buying shoes, buying handbags, buying ear rings and accessories, buying scarves, buying perfumes, watches, gold and diamond jewellery, watching fashion trends, obsessing about their diet and weight and so on. They redo their makeup a thousand times and are constantly glued to the mirror. They even put makeup while driving! Imagine how many hours of hard work that is! It's important to look good and presentable. But, is the amount of time spent (unknowingly or knowingly) to woo the opposite sex, justified? How will you pick up new skills?
If you love clothes or makeup without the need to look attractive to guys, go ahead. But if you're obsessing over it just for the guys.. forget it. Move on.
A lot of women do just this - atleast in their early stages. Later on family and motherhood and career put so much pressure that they are forced to change.
If we didn't care for the men so much, would we obsess about looks? Would we rather do something else like read a book?
What would happen to men when women change their choice of men and start liking only handsome men and men with great bods? Will they also become insecure and fret and fume? I'd like to see that happen.
I am forced to believe, it's coz of the men out there. The attraction between men and women is the reason so many things exist (you, me and the millions of products sold across countries from boob enhancers to lingerie to makeup). Almost all the products sold are either for men to attract women or for women to attract men :-)
So, this attraction is a big thing for many people. They emulate their favourite heroes or heroines, dress up, put on an accent, wear makeup, sing songs and do a lot of things just to attract the opposite sex. Nothing wrong in it. Survival and procreation and extremely hard wired into our genes. The reason a peacock dances, is to woo the female.. all the birds with lovely voices are singing love songs to woo their ladies. So, this attraction exists in all species. No debate about that.
Let's come back to women... Many men say women are jealous. They mock at women. Women mock at themselves. Why do we feel jealous of a beautiful woman? It's most probably because we are afraid that our partner will leave us for her. (I'm not counting myself there as I have never tried to woo someone or be jealous of other girls, lucky me). Men are attracted to feminine beauty. A shapely woman or a beautiful woman is more likely to attract a man than a bespectacled, tangled haired geek. Men are frivolous too. When married men cheat on their wives, the boyfriend has even more excuses. This leads to insecurity. We have to guard our man. We can never be sure if he will leave us for someone else. I have seen so many girls outraged because their boyfriend dumped them for a more beautiful one. They failed to see their beauty and character. Some less fortunate ones could not even make the man of their choice sit up and notice them in the first place. They were not in the list at all. It hurts.. it hurts badly... especially since it's a serious issue for the woman. She is in love with a nice guy and wants him but he just fails to notice her because of this beauty fixation.
Then why is it that men are not insecure? Easy... Women, so far, are attracted to well-read, steady and caring and sensitive men. They choose their men with care. They are not frivolous (mostly). It would be very very hard for her to dump you for a more handsome guy. These things happen nowadays but it's not the norm. So, a guy feels less threatened. If he's financially secure, he doesn't have to worry.
Imagine the kind of pressure this insecurity puts on women! They spend a fortune trying to look beautiful. Most women I know dedicate their entire lives to choosing colorful clothes, wearing them, choosing makeup, wearing makeup, visiting parlours (I too go for my pedicure and hair color), buying shoes, buying handbags, buying ear rings and accessories, buying scarves, buying perfumes, watches, gold and diamond jewellery, watching fashion trends, obsessing about their diet and weight and so on. They redo their makeup a thousand times and are constantly glued to the mirror. They even put makeup while driving! Imagine how many hours of hard work that is! It's important to look good and presentable. But, is the amount of time spent (unknowingly or knowingly) to woo the opposite sex, justified? How will you pick up new skills?
If you love clothes or makeup without the need to look attractive to guys, go ahead. But if you're obsessing over it just for the guys.. forget it. Move on.
A lot of women do just this - atleast in their early stages. Later on family and motherhood and career put so much pressure that they are forced to change.
If we didn't care for the men so much, would we obsess about looks? Would we rather do something else like read a book?
What would happen to men when women change their choice of men and start liking only handsome men and men with great bods? Will they also become insecure and fret and fume? I'd like to see that happen.
Friday, August 23, 2013
The eye craves pleasant things.. beautiful things..
S.Ilayaraja Paintings Collections
http://alraja.blogspot.in/2011/04/ilayaraja-paintings-collections.htmlCaptures rural tamil women in artistic splendour and natural settings. The way light falls on their hair, the shine of the silk zari, the folds of the saree - no wonder the paintings are better than photography. Photography requires less skill than this.
This one takes the cake...Paris breakfasts.
Paris captured through the plate of the eating artist. The vintage tea sets, macarons, coffee, fruits..pretty pretty!!
I wish I could draw this well.. Maybe I'd just be with the colors all my life...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/parisbreakfast/sets/72057594114774269/
Krsna Mehta's works also caught me eye:
http://indiacircus.com/tamara-lotus-rani-blended-fabric-cushion-cover.html
House of Tara
http://www.limeroad.com/brand/the-house-of-tara-270?f_ref=vip#brand[]=The+House+of+Tara&sort[]=scoreBucket5_f%2Bdesc&stock[]=1&pOverlay=none
Ambbii collections:
http://www.limeroad.com/brand/ambbi-collections-343?f_ref=vip#brand[]=Ambbi+Collections&sort[]=scoreBucket5_f%2Bdesc&stock[]=1
and Pip studio.
http://www.pipstudio.com/en/porcelain/floral/coffee-tea/pip-cup-and-saucer-cappuccino
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