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.
Leslie,
a 30-year-old lawyer, walked into her first partner meeting and heads
turned. She had a tendency to catch people's eyes -- being 5'8", shapely
and stylish -- so today was no different. Apprehensive about the case
she planned to present, Leslie felt encouraged by the reactions she
sensed in the room. One partner stood up to shake her hand and another
asked if she wanted some water. Most everyone appeared to welcome her
presence. Two-thirds of the partners were men. All were older than
Leslie by at least 5 years.Whether it's natural beauty, an air
of confidence, or a sense of style, some people just have "it": that
ability to attract attention in a positive way. Why does it happen? Can
it be sustained throughout life? And how does it make us feel -- whether
we have "it" or not?
Harvard sociologist Dr. Nancy Etcoff traces
the ability to grab other people's attention to its biological roots. In
Survival of the Prettiest, she makes the case that we -- meaning
both
men and women -- are genetically programmed to be attracted to good
looks. For hundreds of thousands of years, she says, men have found
youthful, voluptuous women appealing because they signal potential
fertility and fecundity. Women are attracted to men who are tall, dark
and handsome because these qualities suggest virility, strength and the
ability to protect a family. "What was biologically advantageous," she
writes, has become our "aesthetic preference."
Anthropologist and human behavior expert Dr. Helen Fischer
offers neuroscientific evidence that supports this head-turning
behavior. She examined brain scans from subjects who were exposed to
visual imagery during various stages of love and attraction. While there
were differences between the fMRIs of men and women, both showed
significantly greater activity after viewing attractive versus
unattractive stimuli. Interpersonal attraction, Fisher concluded, is not
only measurable, but an undeniable neurological phenomenon.
And
this attraction to beauty begins early in life. A study by British
developmental psychologist Dr. Alan Slater showed that infants stare
significantly longer at faces with symmetrical features, big eyes, set
wide apart in round, less angular faces -- a preference that appears to
cross race and culture.
While we may expect good looks to matter more in
developed countries with large media influences, findings show that
even greater value is placed on physical beauty in socioeconomically
depressed areas where beauty is closely connected to health care and
longevity.
The ugly truth?
Beauty is unfair. People born with a
particular set of genes, who maintain their health, good grooming habits
and develop strong social skills are likely to grow into adults that
have the "it" quality. And while one asset without the other doesn't
guarantee the same result, the fortunate combination of them all leads
to measurable advantages in life that are gained without merit.
Daniel
Hamermesh, author of Beauty Pays, examined the economic benefits gained
by having good looks. Attractive people, he says, are hired more
quickly, paid higher wages and bring in more money to the companies
where they work. Even in jobs where we may not think physical attributes
play much of a role, beauty brings greater financial rewards. For
example, homely NFL quarterbacks -- yes, there are a few -- earn less
than their comelier counterparts, despite identical yards passed and
years in the league. According to Hamermesh's research, attractive
people in general earn an average of three to four percent more than a
person with below average looks, adding up to approximately $230,000
more over a lifetime.
If that weren't enough, attractive people
also receive milder prison sentences and have an easier time getting a
loan than plain folks, reports The Economist in "The Line of Beauty."
They found that "in America more people say they have felt discriminated
against for their appearance than because of their age, race or
ethnicity." Stanford law professor Deborah Rhode looks at this inequity
from a legal perspective. In The Beauty Bias, she writes that
discrimination on the grounds of personal appearance should be banned.
She points toward the
negative consequences of what some call "lookism,"
saying that a huge amount of time and money is spent to undo this
lopsided predilection -- citing our culture's obsession with fashion,
cosmetics and plastic surgery.
Newsweek reported in "The Beauty
Advantage" that 57 percent of the hiring managers they surveyed believe
that unattractive but qualified job applicants are likely to have a
harder time landing work. And more than half of these managers advised
both men and women "to spend as much time and money on making sure they
look attractive as on perfecting a résumé." The New York Times added in
"Up the Career Ladder, Lipstick in Hand," that just the right makeup can
help those without natural good looks appear more capable and reach
cooperate success. For job seekers willing to go further -- and deeper
-- there's always the cornucopia of cosmetic procedures to turn toward
for help. A trend that is rising at a frighteningly steep pace -- a 446
percent increase in the past 15 years -- use of these procedures are
becoming more common as a means to remain competitive, not only
personally, but professionally as well. In spite of the many changes
resulting from the feminist movement, looks remain the key to a positive
self-image in today's world.
If beauty and its rewards are viewed
less as a social evil, and more as an interpersonal reality, can we
learn to recognize it, rather than resent or envy it?
Can we derive the
pleasure that physical beauty brings to our senses -- the way beautiful
art, dance or music does -- even if it is distributed unequally? Many of
us enjoy watching talented performers and skilled athletes without
being consumed by jealousy, then why not do the same when it comes to
those who display beauty. The answer? Take the green out of envy by
moving beyond our otherwise egalitarian values and accept the powerful,
yet unfair influence brought by beauty.
This of course does not
mean we give up on our own attractiveness. We may not all be born with
those symmetrical features deemed beautiful -- the ones that make babies
smile, and that light up adult human brains -- but surely we can find
other ways to look and feel appealing to ourselves and others. Clearly,
we are attracted to our mates even though they may not be classic
beauties. (Note that Dr. Fisher's fMRIs showed increased brain activity
when viewing our loved ones -- whether deemed attractive to others or
not!) And we are awed by our less-than-perfect children who we see as
beautiful regardless of their physical features.
Surely we can find
beauty in ourselves -- and raise our sons and daughters to find it too
-- even if our mirrors tell us we look different from today's "it" girls
and guys portrayed in the media.
And lest we forget, beauty icons
today can end up tomorrow's has-beens if there is nothing but lovely
looks behind their allure. Leslie, and others like her, may be blessed
with advantages rooted in human biology and anthropology, but we know
that heads turn for only so long.
We all age, and as we do, we all have
to find qualities that make us feel attractive underneath the surface
and beyond our youthful looks.
If we accept the undemocratic
distribution of physical assets and feel grateful for what we have, we
can admire the Leslies of the world -- as they walk into boardrooms,
down the street or onto our television and movie screens. Jungian
analyst Dr. Arlene Landau describes them as our current-day version of
Golden Aphrodite, whose allure has been mythologized since ancient Greek
times. No doubt, the power of "it" will continue in today's world and
for years to come. But for we everyday men and women, what really
matters is knowing that
unique beauty -- experienced within and with all
its imperfections -- is the one that lasts a lifetime.
Have you experienced beauty discrimination? Or the advantages that beauty brings? Tell us what you think about this topic.
Vivian
Diller, Ph.D. is a psychologist in private practice in New York City.
She has written articles on beauty, aging, media, models and dancers.
She serves as a consultant to companies promoting health, beauty and
cosmetic products. "Face It: What Women Really Feel As Their Looks
Change" (2010), written with Jill Muir-Sukenick, Ph.D. and edited by
Michele Willens, is a psychological guide to help women deal with the
emotions brought on by their changing appearances.
For more information, please visit my websites at
www.FaceItTheBook.com and
www.VivianDiller.com. Friend me on Facebook (at
http://www.facebook.com/Readfaceit) or continue the conversation on Twitter.
Follow Vivian Diller, Ph.D. on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/DrVDiller
Courtesy:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/face-it/201201/how-enjoy-beauty-rather-envy-it
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http://www.powells.com/biblio?show=TRADE%20PAPER:NEW:9780385479424:14.00&page=excerpt
Excerpt
The Nature of BeautyPhilosophers
ponder it and pornographers proffer it. Asked why people desire
physical beauty, Aristotle said, "No one that is not blind could ask
that question." Beauty ensnares hearts, captures minds, and stirs up
emotional wildfires. From Plato to pinups, images of human beauty have
catered to a limitless desire to see and imagine an ideal human form.
But
we live in the age of ugly beauty, when beauty is morally suspect and
ugliness has a gritty allure. Beauty is equal parts flesh and
imagination: we imbue it with our dreams, saturate it with our longings.
But to spin this another way, reverence for beauty is just an escape
from reality, it is the perpetual adolescent in us refusing to accept a
flawed world. We wave it away with a cliché, "Beauty is in
the eye of the beholder," meaning that beauty is whatever pleases us
(with the subtext that it is inexplicable). But defined this way, beauty
is meaningless--as Gertrude Stein once said about her childhood home,
Oakland, California, "There is no there there."
In 1991, Naomi
Wolf set aside centuries of speculation when she said that beauty as an
objective and universal entity does not exist. "Beauty is a currency
system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by
politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief
system that keeps male dominance intact." According to Wolf, the images
we see around us are based on a myth. Their beauty is like the tales of
Aphrodite, the judgment of Paris, and the apple of discord: made up.
Beauty is a convenient fiction used by multibillion-dollar industries
that create images of beauty and peddle them as opium for the female
masses. Beauty ushers women to a place where men want them, out of the
power structure. Capitalism and the patriarchy define beauty for
cultural consumption, and plaster images of beauty everywhere to stir up
envy and desire. The covetousness they inspire serves their twin goals
of making money and preserving the status quo.
Many intellectuals
would have us believe that beauty is inconsequential. Since it explains
nothing, solves nothing, and teaches us nothing, it should not have a
place in intellectual discourse. And we are supposed to breathe a
collective sigh of relief. After all, the concept of beauty has become
an embarrassment.
But there is something wrong with this picture.
Outside the realm of ideas, beauty rules. Nobody has stopped looking at
it, and no one has stopped enjoying the sight. Turning a cold eye to
beauty is as easy as quelling physical desire or responding with
indifference to a baby's cry. We can say that beauty is dead, but all
that does is widen the chasm between the real world and our
understanding of it.
Before beauty sinks any deeper, let me reel
it in for closer examination. Suggesting that men on Madison Avenue have
Svengali-like powers to dictate women's behavior and preferences, and
can define their sense of beauty, is tantamount to saying that women are
not only powerless but mindless. On the contrary, isn't it possible
that women cultivate beauty and use the beauty industry to optimize the
power beauty brings? Isn't the problem that women often lack the
opportunity to cultivate their other assets, not that they can cultivate
beauty?
As we will see, Madison Avenue cleverly exploits
universal preferences but it does not create them, any more than Walt
Disney created our fondness for creatures with big eyes and little
limbs, or Coca-Cola or McDonald's created our cravings for sweet or
fatty foods. Advertisers and businessmen help to define what adornments
we wear and find beautiful, but I will show that this belongs to our
sense of fashion, which is not the same thing as our sense of beauty.
Fashion is what Charles Baudelaire described as "the amusing, enticing,
appetizing icing on the divine cake," not the cake itself.
The
media channel desire and narrow the bandwidth of our preferences. A
crowd-pleasing image becomes a mold, and a beauty is followed by her
imitator, and then by the imitator of her imitator. Marilyn Monroe was
such a crowd pleaser that she's been imitated by everyone from Jayne
Mansfield to Madonna. Racism and class snobbery are reflected in images
of beauty, although beauty itself is indifferent to race and thrives on
diversity. As Darwin wrote, "If everyone were cast in the same mold,
there would be no such thing as beauty."
Part of the backlash
against beauty grew out of concern that the pursuit of beauty had
reached epic proportions, and that this is a sign of a diseased culture.
When we examine the historical and anthropological literature we will
discover that, throughout human history, people have scarred, painted,
pierced, padded, stiffened, plucked, and buffed their bodies in the name
of beauty. When Darwin traveled on the Beagle in the nineteenth
century, he found a universal "passion for ornament," often involving
sacrifice and suffering that was "wonderfully great."
We allow
that violence is done to the body among "primitive" cultures or that it
was done by ancient societies, but we have yet to realize that beauty
brings out the primitive in every person. During 1996 a reported 696,904
Americans underwent voluntary aesthetic surgery that involved tearing
or burning their skin, shucking their fat, or implanting foreign
materials. Before the FDA limited silicone gel implants in 1992, four
hundred women were getting them every day. Breast implants were once the
province of porn stars; they are now the norm for Hollywood actresses,
and no longer a rarity for the housewife.
These drastic procedures
are done not to correct deformities but to improve aesthetic details.
Kathy Davis, a professor at the University of Utrecht, watched as more
than fifty people tried to persuade surgeons in the Netherlands to alter
their appearance. Except for a man with a "cauliflower nose," she was
unable to anticipate which feature they wanted to alter just by looking
at them. She wrote, "I found myself astounded that anyone could be
willing to undergo such drastic measures for what seemed to me such a
minor imperfection." But there is no such thing as a minor imperfection
when it comes to the face or body. Every person knows the topography of
her face and the landscape of her body as intimately as a mapmaker. To
the outside world we vary in small ways from our best hours to our
worst. In our mind's eye, however, we undergo a kaleidoscope of changes,
and a bad hair day, a blemish, or an added pound undermines our
confidence in ways that equally minor fluctuations in our moods, our
strength, or our mental agility usually do not.
People do
extreme things in the name of beauty. They invest so much of their
resources in beauty and risk so much for it, one would think that lives
depended on it. In Brazil there are more Avon ladies than members of the
army. In the United States more money is spent on beauty than on
education or social services. Tons of makeup--1,484 tubes of lipstick
and 2,055 jars of skin care products--are sold every minute. During
famines, Kalahari bushmen in Africa still use animal fats to moisturize
their skin, and in 1715 riots broke out in France when the use of flour
on the hair of aristocrats led to a food shortage. The hoarding of flour
for beauty purposes was only quelled by the French Revolution.
Either
the world is engaged in mass insanity or there is method in this
madness. Deep inside we all know something: no one can withstand
appearances. We can create a big bonfire with every issue of Vogue, GQ, and Details,
every image of Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, and Cindy Crawford, and
still, images of youthful perfect bodies would take shape in our heads
and create a desire to have them. No one is immune. When Eleanor
Roosevelt was asked if she had any regrets, her response was a poignant
one: she wished she had been prettier. It is a sobering statement from
one of the most revered and beloved of women, one who surely led a life
with many satisfactions. She is not uttering just a woman's lament. In Childhood, Boyhood, Youth,
Leo Tolstoy wrote, "I was frequently subject to moments of despair. I
imagined that there was no happiness on earth for a man with such a wide
nose, such thick lips, and such tiny gray eyes as mine.... Nothing has
such a striking impact on a man's development as his appearance, and not so much his actual appearance as a conviction that it is either attractive or unattractive."
Appearance
is the most public part of the self. It is our sacrament, the visible
self that the world assumes to be a mirror of the invisible, inner self.
This assumption may not be fair, and not how the best of all moral
worlds would conduct itself. But that does not make it any less true.
Beauty has consequences that we cannot erase by denial. Beauty will
continue to operate--outside jurisdiction, in the lawless world of human
attraction. Academics may ban it from intelligent discourse and snobs
may sniff that beauty is trivial and shallow but in the real world the
beauty myth quickly collides with reality.
This book is an inquiry
into what we find beautiful and why--what in our nature makes us
susceptible to beauty, what qualities in people evoke this response, and
why sensitivity to beauty is ubiquitous in human nature. I will argue
that our passionate pursuit of beauty reflects the workings of a basic
instinct. As George Santayana has said, "Had our perceptions no
connection with our pleasures, we should soon close our eyes to this
world .--.--. that we are endowed with the sense of beauty is a pure
gain." My argument will be guided by cutting-edge research in cognitive
science and evolutionary psychology. An evolutionary viewpoint cannot
explain everything about beauty, but I hope to show you that it can help
explain a good many things, and offer a perspective on the place of
beauty in human life.
Beauty as Bait
Many people have
an idyllic conception of childhood as a time when beauty does not
matter. Listen to children taunt and tease each other in a
schoolyard--shrimp, squirt, four eyes, fatso--to quickly disabuse
yourself of that notion. Children gravitate to beauty. One of
photographer Richard Avedon's first snapshots was of his seven-year-old
sister Louise. The nine-year-old Avedon was so entranced by her that he
taped the negative to his skin and had the sun burn it into his
shoulder. Her oval face, dark hair, big eyes, and long throat became
"the prototype of what I considered to be beautiful. She was the
original Avedon beauty." His later photographs of models Dovima, Suzy
Parker, Dorian Leigh, and Carmen Dell'Orefice "are all memories of
Louise."
Children are sensitive to beauty from a very early age,
but how and when do they acquire their preferences? The popular wisdom
is that children learn beauty preferences through acculturation. Perhaps
their parents foist certain tastes upon them, then peers rebelliously
revise the aesthetics, and pop culture finally fine-tunes it. As Robin
Lakoff and Raquel Scherr wrote in their 1984 book Face Value, "Beauty is not instantly and instinctively recognizable: we must be trained from childhood to make those discriminations."
But
psychologist Judith Langlois is convinced that no lessons are required:
we are born with preferences and even a baby knows beauty when she sees
it. Langlois collected hundreds of slides of people's faces and asked
adults to rate them for attractiveness. When she presented these faces
to three- and six-month-old babies, they stared significantly longer at
the faces that adults found attractive. The babies gauged beauty in
diverse faces: they looked longer at the most attractive men, women,
babies, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Caucasians. This
suggests not only that babies have beauty detectors but that human faces
may share universal features of beauty across their varied features.
Langlois
is quick to point out that infants show preferences for beautiful
unfamiliar faces. It is unlikely that an infant's behavior toward his or
her caregivers is influenced by their facial beauty, given the
importance of attachment to the baby's survival. Nor is she suggesting
that babies with attractive mothers have a special eye for beauty.
Babies looked longer at attractive faces regardless of the mother's
attractiveness.
The notion that infants come prewired with beauty
detectors was not the prevailing theory when Judith Langlois began her
research ten years ago. The idea that an infant would be peering out at
the world with the eyes of a neonate beauty judge is downright
discomfiting: even they notice looks? But her results are part of
a growing body of evidence that infants share a universal set of
sensual preferences. They prefer to look more at symmetrical patterns
than at asymmetrical ones, and to touch soft surfaces rather than rough
ones. By four months of age they prefer consonant to dissonant music.
When psychologists Jerome Kagan and Marcel Zentner played dissonant
melodies to babies, they wrinkled their noses in disgust. Kagan and
Zentner felt that they were witnessing the first signs of a preference
for easy listening and mellifluous crooning. We can learn to love
dissonance, but it is an acquired taste.
Babies pay close
attention to the human face. Within ten minutes of emerging from the
mother's body, their eyes follow a line drawing of a face. By day two
they can discriminate their mother's face from a face they have never
seen before. The next day they begin mimicking facial actions: stick out
your tongue at a newborn and the baby will do the same. Each newborn
orients immediately toward whatever is biologically significant, and
topmost will be people who ensure her survival.
Babies look almost
as long at a person's eyes as they do at the whole face, and see there
much of what they need to know. The movements of the eyes and of the
muscles surrounding the eyes, the changes in pupil size, and the gleam
or dullness in our eyes express nuances of feeling. The small individual
differences in distances around the eyes created by the facial bone
structure is one of the most enduring parts of our visual signature, and
as unique as fingerprints. Automatic face recognition systems guided by
computers recognize faces better from the eyes alone than from the nose
or mouth alone. Computers learning to detect faces from nonfaces are
most easily fooled by interference with the eye regions. This is why
masking only the area around the eyes has proved an effective disguise
from Don Juan in the fourteenth century to the Lone Ranger in the
twentieth.
If babies see someone looking at them, they look back,
and usually they smile. Their interest piqued, they will look up to
three times as long at a face looking at them as at a face looking away.
Unlike prey animals such as rabbits and deer which have panoramic,
surround vision, humans, like hawks and leopards and other predators,
look precisely at what they are thinking about. This is why babies come
equipped with mechanisms to detect direction of gaze, and why the human
eye may have evolved its distinctive appearance. Unlike most animals,
which have sclera that darken with age, humans retain white sclera all
of their lives. The whites of the eyes help us gauge where eyes are
looking and give us a good idea of what has captured other people's
attention and what might be on their minds.
An animal stalked by
lions, which can see prey from a mile away, would not be greatly
benefited by seeing the whites of their eyes. By then, it's all over.
But for humans living in close proximity and dependent on one another
for survival, direction of gaze is an effective form of communication,
whether in the form of the predatory gaze, the beseeching look, or the
look of love.
The newborn baby's preferences are formes frustes
of adult preferences. Babies turn into adults who like symmetry and
harmony and things that feel smooth; they are riveted by the sight of
the human face, and aroused when eyes meet theirs. The three-month-old
who stares at beautiful faces grows up to be the usual person whose head
is turned by the sight of beauty and who can fall in love by looking.
When babies fix their stare at the same faces adults describe as highly
attractive, their actions wordlessly argue against the belief that
culture must teach us to recognize human beauty.
The Injustice of the Given
Whether
or not the beautiful is good, beauty seems to bring out goodness in
others. In one psychologist's study, seventy-five college men were shown
photographs of women, some of whom were very attractive and others less
so. They were asked to select the person they would be most likely do
the following for: help move furniture, loan money, donate blood, donate
a kidney, swim one mile to rescue her, save her from a burning
building, and even jump on a terrorist hand grenade. The men were most
likely to volunteer for any of these altruistic and risky acts for a
beautiful woman. The only thing they seemed reluctant to do for her was
loan her money.
Answers to psychologists' questions about
hypothetical situations may have little to do with real behavior. But
when put to the test, at least in small ways, people seem to confirm
what the college boys say. In several staged experiments, psychologists
have tested people's honesty and altruism toward good-looking and
plain-looking people and find that their good deeds are not doled out
evenly. For example, in one study a pretty or an ugly woman approaches a
phone booth and asks the occupant, "Did I leave my dime there?" (There
is a dime in the phone booth.) Eighty-seven percent of people return the
dime to the good-looking woman, but only sixty-four percent return the
dime to the ugly woman. In another study, two women stand by a car with a
flat tire in the roadway: the good-looking one gets rescued first.
People
are more likely to help attractive people even if they don't like them.
In another staged experiment, an attractive or unattractive woman gave
men compliments on their work or criticized it. Afterward, the men were
asked how much they liked the woman. They particularly liked the
attractive woman who praised them, and liked least the attractive woman
who criticized them. But asked to volunteer more time, the men gave it
to the good-looking woman, even when he didn't like her. As the
psychologists wrote, her attractiveness attracted. Attractiveness
attracts even in situations where there is no chance of actually meeting
the recipient of one's favors. In yet another study, completed (bogus)
college applications were left in Detroit airports. A note attached to
them suggested that the applications were given to fathers who had
accidentally left them behind. Each had the identical application
answers, but each had a different photograph attached. People were much
more likely to mail the applications of thebetter-looking applicants.
Interestingly, people are less
likely to ask good-looking people for help. This is particularly true
for men with good-looking women, but it is also true for both men and
women with good-looking members of their own sex (it is less true for
women asking good-looking men for help). But as evolutionary
psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby have shown, people keep a
watchful eye on who has done what for whom. Our efforts to please
good-looking people with no expectation of immediate reward or
reciprocal gesture are one way we reinforce beauty as a form of status,
not unlike being born into the nobility or inheriting wealth. Beauty
represents what writer Jim Harrison has called "the injustice of the
given."
The high status of beauty is one reason why it is a
subject fraught with such heated emotions. Didn't democratic societies
ban the aristocracy and level the playing field? Perhaps this is also
why we are so easily persuaded by the idea that beauty is attainable
through the usual democratic means--hard work and money. If it confers
elite status, then we must make it an elitism based on effort and
achievement, not a priori advantage. Historian Lois Banner has
chronicled "the democratic rhetoric of beauty experts in the early
twentieth century," which insisted that "every woman could be
beautiful." She suggests that such campaigns were dangerous for women
because they held up an unattainable ideal. Estee Lauder's successful
campaigns included her exhortations that "there are no homely women only
careless women .--.--. you have to want it [beauty] very much and then
help it along with some well-chosen products." Paradoxically, the
arguments of twentieth-century beauty experts have often unwittingly
linked beauty with goodness.
Women who were dissatisfied with
what they saw in the mirror now felt not only unattractive but lazy,
inept, or lacking the inner beauty which was supposed to shine forth
with good habits and good concealer.
Happiness
As Ben
Franklin said, "Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces
of good fortune that seldom happen as by the little advantages that
occur every day." As we have seen, great-looking people are afforded
those little advantages all of their lives, so they must be happier.
Beauty,
in fact, does not bring much extra in the way of happiness.
Psychologists Ed Diener and David Myers have spent a lot of time trying
to understand what makes people happy. They focus on "subjective
well-being," a state of mind in which a person feels very positive,
seldom feels negative, and has an overall sense of satisfaction with
life. Ed Diener finds that good-looking men have a somewhat greater
sense of well-being and feel a bit happier than other men. A woman's
beauty sometimes makes her a bit happier than other women, but it can
also make her more unhappy. The overall effect for both sexes is
marginal. The biggest effect is on satisfaction with one's romantic
life. Here the good-looking are happier. But somehow this does not lead
to greater overall life satisfaction.
Why doesn't beauty, that
brings so many advantages, bring more happiness? Diener and Myers
believe that happiness has more to do with personal qualities such as
optimism, a sense of personal control, self-esteem, ability to tolerate
frustration, and feelings of comfort with and affection for people than
with looks or money. They note that it is human nature to keep adjusting
expectations according to circumstances--the more we get, the more we
want since we are always comparing ourselves with people who have more.
As psychologist Timothy Miller observes, "No instinct tells us that we
have accumulated enough status, wealth, or love.... To the
contrary--such an instinctive mechanism would contradict the basic
principles of evolution." The good-looking compare themselves with the
even better-looking, the rich with the even richer. Automatically
running after what you don't have (yet) may give you a competitive edge,
but taken to unreasonable extremes, it can lead to lack of
self-acceptance and lack of joy
. The key to happiness is being
able to occasionally override the more-is-better attitude and appreciate
and feel gratitude for what you have.
Desire is unquenchable. The
psychoanalyst Edith Jacobson has written about beautiful female
patients isolated by their beauty. Catered to all of their lives, they
become convinced that they can get whatever they want and whomever they
want, a stance bound to lead to frustration at each rebuff and setback.
As Betrand Russell wrote, "He forgets that to be without some of the
things you want is an indispensable part of happiness."
Studies of
twins suggest that happiness may be partly under the control of the
genes. Behavioral geneticist David Lykken studied fifteen hundred pairs
of twins, comparing identical twins who share one hundred percent of
their genes to fraternal twins, who are no more similar genetically than
other siblings. Lykken and coauthor Auke Tellegen concluded that people
are born with a "set point" for happiness, an equilibrium point to
which their mood returns after brief fluctuations. In other words, some
people will have natural tendencies to worry or brood while others will
be sanguine. On a recent episode of the Charlie Rose show, the host
chided actor Liam Neeson for not "being on top of the world. How," he
asked, "could you not be ecstatically happy, given your career success,
your marriage, your life?" Neeson did not say he was unhappy, but just
that he was a worrier. The many happy turns in his life had not changed
that.
And there is self-esteem, one ingredient of happiness that
is more tightly linked to how we see ourselves than to how others see
us. As Eleanor Roosevelt remarked, "No one can make you feel inferior
without your consent." Our beauty as others judge it is linked to social
ease, but it is not linked strongly to self-esteem. Even if others
think we are beautiful, we may not if we are constantly comparing
ourselves to the even more beautiful. But our beauty as we see it is
linked to self-esteem. Ed Diener speculates that "it seems plausible
that happier people tend to perceive themselves as somewhat more
attractive than objective ratings might indicate." Happier individuals
also enhance their appearance more with clothing, makeup, jewelry, and
so on than do unhappy people, thereby maximizing their assets.
Beauty
has a downside. People assume that the beautiful may make less faithful
partners and may be more likely to seek a divorce. Beautiful women may
be seen as less likely to make good mothers, and beautiful men may get
questioned about their sexual orientation, no matter what their
preference. And beauty can be damn distracting. William Butler Yeats
apologized to Anne Gregory: "Only God, my dear, could love you for
yourself alone, and not your yellow hair."
When people judge
integrity, sensitivity, and concern for others from facial appearance,
beauty has little power. A face radiating kindness and sympathy may not
be beautiful, and a beautiful face may look aloof, blank, haughty, or
self-absorbed without losing its beauty. As Montaigne said, "There are
propitious physiognomies; and in a crowd of enemies all unknown to you,
you will immediately pick one rather than another to whom you surrender
and to whom you will entrust your life and not precisely from
considerations of beauty." But even Montaigne concludes, "A face is a
poor guarantee; nevertheless it deserves some consideration." Beauty may
bring small advantages, even here.
But the downsides are not
inconsiderable, particularly for a woman. She may be favored in a
million small ways but if what's important to her is to be seen as a
good mother, to succeed in a high-level profession, and to be honored
for her kindness and integrity, beauty may either be irrelevant or it
may even interfere with her chances to be seen as she is, and wants to
be. Beauty is not a sure road to happiness.
Despite all this, no
one offered a chance to be more beautiful would turn it down. As
vaudeville star Sophie Tucker once said, "I've been poor and I've been
rich and rich is better."
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