essay on beauty vs brain

Beauty vs. Brain Debate: Navigating the Controversy

In the perennial discussion of beauty versus brain, opinions sway like a pendulum. This article aims to unravel the complexities of this debate, delving into diverse viewpoints, and ultimately, the harmony between beauty and intelligence.

Table of Contents

The Allure of Beauty

Beauty’s influence on perception.

Beauty often acts as a compelling force, influencing how individuals are perceived in various aspects of life. From career opportunities to social interactions, the impact of physical attractiveness cannot be denied.

Beauty’s Societal Privileges

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Society tends to accord certain privileges to those deemed beautiful. The doors of opportunity may swing open more readily for individuals with attractive features, a phenomenon that contributes to the perpetuation of beauty-centric ideals.

The debate on whether beauty is better than brains has been a subject of discussion for a long time. While both beauty and intelligence have their own unique significance , there are several compelling reasons why intelligence is often considered to be more important than beauty. Here are 10 reasons why intelligence is often perceived as an advantage over beauty:

Intellect is Everlasting : Unlike beauty, which fades with time, intelligence is everlasting and can even shine more with time.
Enhanceable : While beauty is a gift from God that cannot be improved, intelligence may be enhanced by human effort and the acquisition of worldly knowledge
Success and Career : In today’s world, intelligence has surpassed beauty. While beauty may initially impress others , it is intelligence that lasts and is essential for success and a successful career
Professional Sector : In the professional sector, beauty isn’t as important as it once was. Employees must be physically fit for the job and must be able to demonstrate their worth, which is where intelligence comes into play
Relationships and World Unity : Intelligence preserves relationships and binds the world together as a single entity
Dominance : Even the most unattractive individuals can have a sharp intelligence and the ability to dominate, while a handsome brainless moron cannot compete in life
Respect and Job Retention : The brain has the ability to keep a job and acquire respect, which is essential for job retention and career advancement
Judgment Time : The proper time to judge is when the brain shines like a diamond and paves its way out of a tough situation . Unfortunately, beauty is often dragged into the issue
Beauty Pageants : Even beauty pageants such as Miss World and Miss Universe are awarded on the basis of intelligence, highlighting the importance of intelligence over beauty

Beauty is Better than Brain Debate

Before exploring the opposing viewpoint, let’s delve deeper into the aspects that make proponents favor beauty over intelligence.

The Significance of Intelligence

The power of cognitive abilities.

Intelligence, often associated with problem-solving, critical thinking, and innovation, holds undeniable importance. A sharp mind contributes to personal and professional success, fostering adaptability in an ever-evolving world.

Intelligence as a Catalyst for Change

Brains drive progress and societal advancements. The power of intellect has propelled humanity forward, from scientific breakthroughs to technological innovations that shape our modern landscape.

Beauty is Better than Brain Debate (Oppose)

Before drawing conclusions, let’s unravel the layers of the opposing argument, shedding light on the aspects that favor intelligence over beauty.

Navigating the Gray Area: Finding Harmony

Embracing both beauty and intelligence.

Rather than perpetuating a binary narrative, recognizing the harmony between beauty and intelligence is essential. Many argue for an integrated approach that values both physical allure and mental prowess.

FAQs: Deciphering the Intricacies of the Debate

Does physical attractiveness impact career success? Yes, studies suggest that attractive individuals may have advantages in certain career opportunities due to societal biases.
Can intelligence enhance personal relationships? Intelligence contributes to effective communication and problem-solving, positively influencing personal relationships.
Is there societal pressure to conform to beauty standards ? Yes, societal expectations often dictate beauty standards, placing undue pressure on individuals to conform to specific physical ideals.
How do cultural perceptions influence the beauty vs. brain debate? Cultural norms and values play a significant role in shaping perceptions of beauty and intelligence, contributing to varied viewpoints in the debate.
Can a balance between beauty and intelligence be achieved ? Yes, individuals can strive for a harmonious balance, recognizing the importance of both physical attractiveness and intellectual capabilities.
Are there instances where beauty or intelligence alone triumphs? While there are situations where one may take precedence, a nuanced approach acknowledges that both beauty and intelligence can contribute to success.

As the beauty vs. brain debate persists, it becomes evident that the dichotomy oversimplifies the complexity of human existence. Embracing both beauty and intelligence allows for a more holistic understanding , fostering a society that values diversity in all its forms.

Perception and Deception: Human Beauty and the Brain

Human physical characteristics and their perception by the brain are under pressure by natural selection to optimize reproductive success. Men and women have different strategies to appear attractive and have different interests in identifying beauty in people. Nevertheless, men and women from all cultures agree on who is and who is not attractive, and throughout the world attractive people show greater acquisition of resources and greater reproductive success than others. The brain employs at least three modules, composed of interconnected brain regions, to judge facial attractiveness: one for identification, one for interpretation and one for valuing. Key elements that go into the judgment are age and health, as well as symmetry, averageness, face and body proportions, facial color and texture. These elements are all Costly Signals of reproductive fitness because they are difficult to fake. However, people deceive others using tricks such as coloring hair, cosmetics and clothing styles, while at the same time they also focus on detecting fakes. People may also deceive themselves, especially about their own attractiveness, and use self-signally actions to demonstrate to themselves their own true value. The neuroscience of beauty is best understood by considering the evolutionary pressures to maximize reproductive fitness.

1. Introduction

Human nature includes a desire to be attractive, and historically much of the fine arts are depictions of human beauty. Much time, money and emotional energy are spent in improving our appearance to reach a goal of beauty. People feel better about themselves when they think they are attractive to others. We devote portions of our brains to evaluating characteristics of attractiveness that are remarkably similar among cultures. Our bodies are shaped not only for function but also to match the image of attractiveness to others.

The simple answer that “beauty is for attracting mates” is no longer sufficient to explain the wealth of data on human preferences for beauty. Attractiveness is part of our status ranking among our same-sex peers, and we actively deceive others and ourselves about our personal appearance.

This review is crafted to place the study of personal appearance and beauty in the context of evolutionary biology. This theoretical framework best explains the quirkiness, universality and unexpected behaviors of people striving to be attractive and seeking out beautiful people.

2. The Evolutionary Biology of Beauty

The principle of evolutionary biology is that when there is genetic variation within a population of a characteristic that improves the individual’s chance of survival and reproduction (sending its genes into several succeeding generations), that characteristic with the best improvement will be naturally selected over other forms and becomes more common within the population. Eventually that characteristic phenotype will become nearly universal, and the genetic variant producing the favored phenotype will become “fixed” in the population.

Some phenotypes improve an individual’s acquisition of food, such as running stamina or manual dexterity. However, those phenotypes that directly improve the chances of reproduction, such as attracting mates and obtaining help in raising children, are under even stronger selection pressure, since they directly influence the frequency with which those genes are passed to the next generation.

2.1. Reproductive Strategy

Men and women have different strategies for reproductive success that were honed during tens of thousands of prehistoric years. Women seek men for partners who will contribute material resources as well as good genes to their children, while men seek one or more female partners with good genes, some of whom they may provide with resources. The strategy of each sex includes advertising to potential mates, and competing members of the same sex, to demonstrate that he or she is valuable (reviewed in [ 1 ]). The display of these traits is called “attractiveness” or “beauty”.

2.2. Universality of Attractiveness Judgements

Assessments of attractiveness are surprisingly similar between men and women and among groups of people. A meta-analysis, covering 919 studies and over 15,000 observers, reported that people agree, both within cultures and across cultures, who is attractive and who is not [ 2 ]. Men and women as well as people of all ages agree on who is attractive. This strongly suggests that judgments of physical attractiveness are hard-wired in human genetics, likely fixed at an early stage in our evolution. These assessment tools are available at a remarkably early stage of human development. Six-month-old infants gazed longer at faces judged by adults as attractive and spent less time looking at faces that were judged as not attractive [ 3 ].

2.3. Attractive People Succeed

Judgments of attractiveness have real consequences because they are cues of a person’s health and fitness, which indicate the ability to donate good genes and successfully raise children. Attractiveness is the most important predictor of who gets the preferred choice in mates [ 4 ]. In fact, in the modern world, physical attractiveness is significantly associated with reproductive success [ 5 ]. A woman who chooses a male partner who contributes not only good genetic material but also provides resources will on average be more successful than a woman without such support [ 6 ].

This means that attractiveness and the ability to accurately detect attractiveness are under evolutionary selective pressure. Therefore, it is not surprising that the brain has developed specialized systems to accurately assess attractiveness characteristics, such as age, health and reproductive potential.

3. The Neuroscience of Facial Recognition

3.1. brain loci.

The most extensive research on the brain regions used in assessing beauty has been reported for facial recognition [ 7 ] and less research has been reported on body judgments [ 8 ]. Brain loci used to judge the beauty of faces are distinct in distribution and activation intensity from those used to assess the beauty of non-facial visual art [ 9 ], reflecting the evolutionary salience of facial beauty. While a few loci have been linked together to suggest a pathway for the evaluation of beauty, this is not to suggest that this is the only way the brain makes these judgments and, under special conditions, the plasticity of the brain may invoke other regions to participate in reaching assessments.

The brain uses at least three modules, or cognitive domains, in deciding the value of attractiveness. The occipital and temporal regions of the cortex are used first to process face views [ 10 ]. The inferior occipital gyri (IOG) perceives facial features and passes the information to the fusiform face area (FFA) of the fusiform gyrus (FG) for facial recognition [ 11 ]. The FFA recognizes and processes the location of facial features (especially the eyes, nose, and mouth) and their spacing [ 12 ]. People have distinct eye movement patterns (scan path routines) when they judge unfamiliar faces [ 13 ], and they simultaneously engage the FFA region during this routine [ 14 ]. Damage to the FFA causes prosopagnosia, a condition in which patients are unable to recognize faces by sight or accurately judge facial attractiveness, although they can recognize the same people by voice [ 9 , 15 ]. The FG very quickly responds more strongly to attractive faces than unattractive ones [ 16 ], suggesting that the ease of recognition of attractive features occurs perhaps even before the rest of the brain is included in the evaluation.

The IOG connects to the second module, including the superior temporal sulcus (STS) for interpretation of facial movement, such as eye gaze, lip movement and facial expressions [ 8 ]. The FFA and IOG then interact with other brain regions, such as the occipital face area (OFA) and the ventral anterior temporal lobes (vATLs) for feature abstraction and assessment [ 17 ], and the amygdala, insula and limbic system for the emotional content of facial expressions and movement [ 8 ].

Information from the STS is also passed to the third module, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), including the nucleus accumbens, for making judgments of beauty and producing the neurological rewards (dopamine and other neurotransmitters) for finding it [ 18 ]. The OFC responds with greater activity to attractive versus unattractive faces [ 6 ]. When men were shown faces of beautiful women while their brains were scanned by fMRI, the attractive faces specifically activated the nucleus accumbens in the caudate region of the brain, when compared to viewing average faces [ 19 ]. Transcranial stimulation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) increased the perceived attractiveness of faces but did not affect other facial judgments such as age [ 20 ]. These studies suggest that the value but not the features of the face are decided in these third module cortical regions.

Human bodies, both self and others, are selectively perceived in the temporal lobes by the extrastriate body area (EBA) and the fusiform body area (FBA), whether they are full body representations, stick figures or silhouettes [ 21 ]. The OFC, particularly the nucleus accumbens and anterior cingulate cortex, are then used in judging the beauty of nude bodies [ 22 ]. Similar regions of the brain are used in evaluating sculptures and similarly posed real human bodies [ 23 ].

3.2. Gender-Specific Brain Activation

Male and female brains activate differently while evaluating appearance and beauty, consistent with their differences in reproductive strategy. For heterosexuals, opposite-sex faces stimulate assessment and reward brain systems, such as the amygdala, cingulate and insular cortices, more than same-sex faces, signifying they hold greater salience [ 6 ]. Both heterosexual men and women favor viewing attractive faces, but men willingly expend more effort to view beautiful women’s than men’s faces, while women spend less energy, and equivalent amounts, to view both beautiful men’s and women’s faces [ 24 ]. Men show slower response times to beautiful faces than women, evidencing greater cognitive load while processing attractive faces [ 25 ]. Consistent with this, brain imaging studies show that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) of male subjects is more sensitive to physical attributes, such as the youthfulness and gender of faces, than female subjects [ 26 ].

4. Appearance and Beauty Judgments

4.1. gender differences in attractiveness features and perception.

The sex hormones, testosterone in men and estrogen in women, largely drive the body and facial features that define attractiveness, and also reshape the brain to detect and value these features. The onset of puberty ramps up hormone levels and reshapes the male and female bodies. Men increase their shoulder to waist ratio, their beards grow, and their jawlines become more pronounced. For women, breasts develop, the hips to waist ratio increases, and their jawlines and facial features become softer. Several regions of the brain express either estrogen/progesterone receptors or androgen receptors, and brain structure and responses are, therefore, on different developmental trajectories in men and women beginning in puberty [ 6 ].

Women are so attuned to the facial features of men that simply by looking at their photographs they can correctly rank order a group of men based on their saliva testosterone level [ 27 ]. Interestingly, while a woman tends to prefer a man with high testosterone for an affair, she prefers a little less testosterone for a long-term mate, and her parents (who might have to help take care of any babies if the man leaves) tend to prefer even a little less testosterone [ 28 ]. Exaggerating the masculinity of men’s pictures actually makes them less attractive [ 26 ].

On the other hand, estrogen monotonically drives female beauty [ 29 ]. Panels of men and women were shown women’s faces that were morphed to exaggerate feminized features, and 95% of men and women decided that the feminization of women’s faces made them more attractive. The same result was found for faces of European, African and Asian descent [ 30 ]. In another study, estrogen was measured in women over the course of their monthly cycles. Both men and other women rated their attractiveness. Women with higher estrogen levels had higher ratings of femininity, attractiveness and health. Interestingly, when the women wore color cosmetics, the correlation disappeared, suggesting that makeup literally “makes up” for lower estrogen levels [ 31 ].

4.2. Age Perception

Youth is a major component of facial attractiveness [ 32 ] and underlies most of the specific characteristics people look for in judging attractiveness. Older faces are judged as less attractive, less likeable, less distinctive, and less energetic [ 33 ]. The appearance of aging past the prime of life is an assault on self-esteem and confidence [ 34 ].

In particular, age is used, along with other skin and body signs, to assess standing in the community, desirability as a partner, and reproductive potential [ 35 , 36 ]. Traditionally, men more than women tend to accumulate resources with age (which makes them more attractive partners), while women more than men tend to lose fertility with age. As a result, the sharp decline in attractiveness with women’s age after menopause is largely driven by male perception, while the perception of increased power of men with age is predominantly due to female opinions [ 37 ].

People are exquisitely sensitive to the age of others and are excellent judges of each other’s age, with a correlation coefficient of perceived to actual age of 0.95 [ 38 ]. Just by viewing a swatch of skin people are able to correctly judge age, with a correlation coefficient of more than 0.60 [ 39 ]. The most important factors in judging age from facial images are the size of the eyes and the lips, and the evenness of skin tone, regardless of what that tone might be [ 34 ].

4.3. Health Perception

People use specific cues from the appearance of others to make judgments about that person’s health, including the history as well as the current state of health. Assessments of health often overlap assessments of age in determining beauty, such as in the case of the sclera, or white part of the eyes. Sclera become darker and colored with age or poor health, and the whiteness of sclera are strongly correlated with the perception of youth, health and attractiveness [ 40 ].

4.4. Symmetry

Throughout the animal kingdom, and certainly among people, body symmetry is a strong signal of past and present health. Bilateral symmetry is a sign of the absence of congenital or developmental defect, malnutrition or parasitic infection, all of which are common maladies in subsistence living [ 41 ]. Although minor variations are often of no functional consequence, they do have dramatic impact on the perception of beauty [ 42 ]. The absence of a history of pathology is a good sign of reproductive fitness and the preference for symmetry is culturally universal [ 43 ], suggesting that it is hard-wired into brain judgments by natural selection and not derived from culture.

Women prefer men with symmetrical faces and can select symmetrical men from their scent [ 6 ]. Unfortunately for cologne manufacturers, the scent of androstenone is an unpleasant under-arm smell. Her preference for symmetry is even heightened during a woman’s fertile phase of her monthly cycle [ 44 ], an effect found for several female preferences that is called ovulatory shift .

4.5. Average Features

Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin and the inventor of fingerprinting, was studying the faces of criminals to identify diagnostic facial features and was the first to report that the average face prepared by composites of criminal faces is more attractive than individual faces [ 45 ]. The preference for the average is found among all cultures [ 46 ] and strengthens as children develop after 5 years of age [ 47 ]. Interestingly, male preference for women’s faces is correlated to facial averageness, but women’s self-perceived attractiveness is not correlated with their averageness [ 48 ].

There may be several reasons for the preference for average facial features. One trivial explanation is that the preparation of composites tends to smooth out asymmetrical or uneven features of individuals. A second is that the very nature of cultural learning favors the most common feature or practice [ 49 ]. A third is that, assuming facial features are under genetic control and are adaptive, natural selection will favor a fitness peak that we perceive as average compared to the less fit facial forms. Finally, the beauty of average may lie in the fact that it is most expected and imposes the least cognitive load to recognize and interpret [ 4 ].

Despite the preference for average, exaggerating some key facial features actually improved the attractiveness of faces [ 26 ], meaning that average is attractive, but unusually endowed faces may be more attractive. This phenomenon (found throughout the animal kingdom) is termed signal shift : a preference for an elemental characteristic, and a heightened preference for the extreme form [ 50 ]. The signal shift response may identify a simple characteristic the brain overweighs in valuing faces. There is a limit to the attractiveness of exaggerated features, and an extreme form that is outside the range of normal experience causes extra work for the brain, which then considers the form weird and ugly.

4.6. Face Proportions

As social creatures, humans read other people’s intentions and emotions in their faces and adjust their behavior accordingly. People also view the face as an important determinant of attractiveness, which is a signal of reproductive fitness. As discussed previously, people of both sexes and nearly all cultures agree on which faces are attractive and which are not. The features people find attractive are shaped in part by sex hormones, including stronger or softer jaw and larger or smaller eye shape [ 51 ]. However, the cognitive processes that determine attractiveness are not always accessible to consciousness. Composites were prepared from a group of college students, one composite from those judged most attractive and another from those judged least attractive [ 26 ]. People who view the two composites side by side can agree on which is more attractive, but it is difficult to put into words which features lead to the decision.

The eyes are a specific target of the human face for social interaction and beauty assessment. The brain uses a special region, the superior temporal sulcus, for the job of following eye movements in others and determining the direction of their view [ 52 ]. This region develops early, and neonates learn within months to follow their mothers’ gaze [ 53 ]. Eye recognition is wired directly into the most fundamental emotional processing unit in the brain—the amygdala [ 54 ].

By contrast, the prominence of the ears and nose are not signals of beauty, because the length of both the ears [ 55 ] and nose [ 56 ] relative to the rest of the face continue to increase with age.

4.7. Body Proportions

Body shape is also a signal of reproductive fitness. People universally have a preference for shape as expressed in the ratio of waist to hips for men of 0.9, and waist to hips for women of 0.7 [ 36 ]. In one study, men were shown pictures of naked women before and after surgery that improved their waist-to-hip ratio to be closer to 0.7 and found that approaching the ideal specifically activated the orbitofrontal cortex and the anterior cingulated cortex [ 57 ], regions that are also used in judging the attractiveness of faces. These preferences arise early, with children as young as 3-years-old selecting canonical body shapes over those with altered legs to trunk ratios [ 58 ].

The movement of other people is also of great interest to social humans. The extrastriate body area (EBA) of the occipitotemporal area is selectively activated in evaluating human bodies and movement [ 21 ] and such activation for heterosexuals is greater for opposite-sex bodies than same-sex bodies [ 59 ].

4.8. Foot Size

As women age and bear children, the size of their feet relative to their height increases [ 60 , 61 ]. A proportionately small foot is therefore a signal of youth and untapped reproductive potential. Not surprisingly, both men and women prefer small feet in women. In a series of studies, images of both men and women were altered to increase or decrease the size of the foot relative to height. Observers of the images, both men and women, preferred the natural proportion of foot to height in men over exaggerated smaller or larger feet. But they predominately judged the disproportionately smaller foot of women as more attractive than the natural proportion [ 62 , 63 ]. High heeled women’s shoes achieve the appearance of a smaller foot by raising the heel relative to the toe and shortening the distance from the heel to the toe in the footprint. The shoe generally just covers the toes and not the instep, further accentuating the appearance of a small step.

4.9. Facial Color and Wrinkles

Despite the variation in underlying skin tones, the homogeneity of skin color is correlated with increased attractiveness and appearance of healthiness in every culture examined [ 64 , 65 ]. People who view a cropped image of a cheek were able to accurately judge age, based on the homogeneity of skin tone [ 39 ]. In traditional Chinese medicine, skin color is used as a diagnostic tool for disease [ 66 ].

Among Caucasians, men perceive red tones in women’s faces as more attractive than less red faces because it is viewed as a sign of health. [ 67 ]. For these women, red facial coloration tracks their level of estradiol, and facial coloration may provide men with cues about fertility [ 68 ].

Facial color gradient is also important because as skin color gets darker with age, the color contrast between the hair, eyes and facial skin is reduced [ 69 ]. This is a consistent finding among many ethnic groups, including Caucasians, Chinese, Latin Americans and South Africans [ 70 ] Wrinkling increases with age and sun exposure and is a strong signal for judging age [ 71 ]. The discoloration of skin with age is interpreted as a loss of health, while wrinkling is perceived as a sign of age and loss of fertility [ 71 ].

5. Costly Signals and Deception

5.1. costly signals.

The brain has evolved its focus on these features of attractiveness and beauty because not only are they reliable measures of health and reproductive fitness, but they are (or have been for most of our evolutionary history) difficult to fake. Such features that genuinely signal reproductive fitness are known as Costly Signals [ 72 ]. Costly Signals that are specific to one sex or the other are subject to strong sexual selection. One sex prefers a feature signaling reproductive fitness and chooses partners who have that feature. The next generation produces one sex that favor the Costly Signal and the other sex that displays it. This is called the Green Beard Effect, after the hypothetical example of two sets of genes that co-evolve, one set that produces a green beard in males and another set that prefers a green beard in females. This can lead to the run-away evolution of exaggerated features, such as extraordinarily large elk antlers or peacock feathers. The key element is that the Costly Signal must be biologically difficult to produce, or else fakers without the necessary reproductive fitness will display the feature and gain unwarranted mating opportunities.

Most if not all of the characteristics described here as signs of attractiveness and beauty are Costly Signals. They reflect healthy development, absence of disease, and display the level of sex hormones that reflect fertility. Human culture has added body ornaments and possessions to Costly Signals. These are additional signs of wealth and resource acquisition that also signal reproductive fitness, including decorative clothing and jewelry, lavish housing and luxury possessions.

5.2. Deception

Humans have also devised ways by which they deceive others as to their true reproductive fitness by faking Costly Signals.

5.2.1. Makeup and Cosmetics

Women around the world apply makeup to alter their appearance. Facial recognition by the brain is made more difficult by heavy makeup, especially if the face was first seen without makeup [ 73 ]. Makeup can be so deceptive that it impairs automated facial recognition software [ 74 ].

As noted before, the application of makeup overcomes the influence of fluctuating estrogen levels on perceptions of attractiveness [ 27 ]. By darkening hair color and lightening skin complexion, cosmetics are used to counter this sign of aging by enhancing contrast [ 62 ]. Cosmetics also even out skin tone, and for people shown pictures of both made-up and no makeup faces, the number of eye fixations and dwell time were positively correlated with skin color homogeneity [ 66 ]. Overall, makeup reduces the perceived age of women, and the older the woman, the greater the reduction of the perceived age [ 75 ]. This has significant social benefits, since the use of makeup leads to an increase in the perception of likability, competence and trustworthiness [ 76 ], as well as dominance and prestige [ 77 ].

Eye makeup increases the appearance of the size of women’s eyes [ 78 ] and has the greatest effect on attractiveness as judged by both men and women [ 65 ]. Observers look at the eyes of women with eye makeup 40% longer than women without it, and if the rest of the face is made up, the attention to the eyes increased 80% [ 79 ]. Lipstick, which increases the appearance of the size and accentuates the shape of the lip, increases the time people spend looking at the lips by 26% [ 68 ].

Deception by cosmetics has measurable economic consequences. Male patrons at a French restaurant gave tips more often to waitresses who wore makeup and, when they did tip, they gave them larger amounts of money than to waitresses without makeup. There was no difference for female patrons, even though both male and female patrons thought that the waitresses were more attractive when they wore makeup [ 80 ]. In macroeconomic theory, the Lipstick Effect (first formulated by cosmetics magnate Leonard Lauder) is the increase in sales of lipsticks during economic downturns, as women turn to small pleasures to compensate for losses and increase their appearance advantage in a more competitive environment. A review of recessions over the past 50 years confirmed that during downturns women tend to increase their purchase of products that enhance their appearance while decreasing their purchase of non-appearance-enhancing products [ 81 ].

5.2.2. Deception Detection

Maintaining the value of Costly Signals against deception requires that people are able to detect and punish cheating. Within the brain, the frontal lobe and amygdala are key components of the “lie detector”, as demonstrated by a patient with brain damage in this region who was unable to detect cheating, even though otherwise cognitively normal [ 82 ]. The brain is especially attuned to negative information, emphasizing the importance of detecting fakes and posers. Test subjects were significantly more likely to retain and consciously process a human face if it was associated with negative gossip rather than positive or neutral gossip [ 83 ]. Since women have the greater stake in detecting who is or is not faking Costly Signals among potential mates and rivals, it is not surprising that many studies have shown that women outperform men in detecting lies and inferring emotions from subtle cues [ 71 ].

5.3. Self-Deception and Self-Signaling

The best way to convince others of a lie is to believe it yourself, and natural selection is strong enough to build a genetically controlled self-deception mechanism [ 84 ]. Many studies suggest that people are objectively accurate in evaluating others but view themselves with an optimism bias.

5.3.1. Self-Assessment

People agree with a correlation of 0.79 about the attractiveness of others, but correlations between self-ratings and objective measures of individual attractiveness are remarkably low: 0.24 for men and 0.25 for women [ 85 ]. People maintain an image of themselves that is much better than others perceive. For example, photographs of volunteers were morphed to make them progressively more attractive or less attractive. The subjects, both Western Europeans and Asians, were then invited to pick out from the array of pictures the one that was the accurate representation of themselves. The median choice was a picture that was 20% more attractive [ 86 ]. They were also quicker to recognize the more attractive photo than their actual photo, a revealing result considering that people recognize objects more quickly when they match their mental representations.

5.3.2. Self-Deception

The brain can hold a truthful and false belief at the same time because it is composed of domain-specific cognitive modules, each of which evolved for solving a specific problem [ 87 ]. For example, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is integral to processing self-related information but remains quiet when the brain considers non-self-referential information [ 88 ]. These modules are not tightly connected and not all are accessible to consciousness. Often, these modules reach a decision which is only later rationalized by conscious thought [ 89 ].

Facial attractiveness is so salient to people that it can influence unrelated opinions, such as the perception of fairness. In the Ultimatum Game, a player is offered an arbitrary split of money by a proposer, which he can either accept or reject as unfair. Male players accepted offers as fair from attractive women that they rejected when proposed by unattractive women [ 90 ], suggesting that a man can deceive himself into believing an offer is fair just because the proposer is beautiful.

5.3.3. Self-Signaling

Since the world is a competitive place, people are concerned with their own level of reproductive fitness and social status. However, they cannot know their own status with any certainty, in part because they lie to themselves about their own value. Therefore, they use various signals to themselves to demonstrate their own value [ 91 ], such as overcoming challenges or acquiring costly goods or making generous donations, even when no one else knows about it. Self-signaling explains many behaviors of people in secret, private or anonymous purchasing or charity transactions [ 92 ]. Many efforts by people to alter or improve their appearance beyond what is conventional or apparent to others, such as some types of cosmetic surgery and even piercings or tattooing on body sites covered by hair or clothing, may be understood as a signal to oneself.

6. Conclusions

Dr. Theodosius Dobzhansky, the famous geneticist, wrote in 1973 that “ nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution ”. Since the human form and the brain co-evolved in the 5 million years since our last common ancestor with the apes, we can say that nothing in beauty makes sense except in light of the brain. Natural selection favors individuals with greater reproductive fitness and also those who display signs of greater fitness, as well as those who can detect them.

The Costly Signals of fitness for humans include health, youth, and ideal proportions. The brain has evolved modules to perceive facial and body shapes, interpret their meaning, and then assign value—beautiful and attractive, or not. Since men and women have different reproductive strategies, and different sex hormones shape their bodies, the brain is tuned to those features driven by these gender-specific development patterns in reaching decisions about attractiveness. A key finding is that men and women of all cultures agree on which men and women are attractive and who are not.

People use cosmetics and surgical procedures to fake Costly Signals, while at the same time they are always on the lookout to detect cheaters. Deceivers are more convincing when they believe the lie themselves, and we have ample evidence of self-deception in beauty. In this fog of competition, people use self-signaling to indicate to themselves their own worth. None of this makes sense except in light of the neuroscience of beauty.

This research received no external funding.

Conflicts of Interest

The author declares no conflict of interest.

February 2, 2021

How the Brain Responds to Beauty

Scientists search for the neural basis of an enigmatic experience

By Jason Castro &

Andriy Onufriyenko Getty Images

Pursued by poets and artists alike, beauty is ever elusive. We seek it in nature, art and philosophy but also in our phones and furniture. We value it beyond reason, look to surround ourselves with it and will even lose ourselves in pursuit of it. Our world is defined by it, and yet we struggle to ever define it. As philosopher George Santayana observed in his 1896 book The Sense of Beauty , there is within us “a very radical and wide-spread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it.”

Philosophers such as Santayana have tried for centuries to understand beauty, but perhaps scientists are now ready to try their hand as well. And while science cannot yet tell us what beauty is, perhaps it can tell us where it is—or where it isn’t. In a recent study, a team of researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing and their colleagues examined the origin of beauty and argued that it is as enigmatic in our brain as it is in the real world.

There is no shortage of theories about what makes an object aesthetically pleasing. Ideas about proportion, harmony, symmetry, order, complexity and balance have all been studied by psychologists in great depth. The theories go as far back as 1876—in the early days of experimental psychology—when German psychologist Gustav Fechner provided evidence that people prefer rectangles with sides in proportion to the golden ratio (if you’re curious, that ratio is about 1.6:1).

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At the time, Fechner was immersed in the project of “outer psychophysics ”—the search for mathematical relationships between stimuli and their resultant percepts. What both fascinated and eluded him, however, was the much more difficult pursuit of “inner psychophysics”—relating the states of the nervous system to the subjective experiences that accompany them. Despite his experiments with the golden ratio, Fechner continued to believe that beauty was, to a large degree, in the brain of the beholder.

So what part of our brain responds to beauty? The answer depends on whether we see beauty as a single category at all. Brain scientists who favor the idea of such a “beauty center” have hypothesized that it may live in the orbitofrontal cortex, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex or the insula. If this theory prevails, then beauty really could be traced back to a single region of the brain. We would experience beauty in the same way whether we were listening to Franz Schubert song, staring at a Diego Velázquez painting or seeing a doe denning under the starlight.

If the idea of a beauty center is correct, then this would be a considerable victory for theory of functional localization. Under this view—which is both widely held and widely contested—much of what the brain does is the result of highly specialized modules. To simplify the idea a bit, we could imagine assigning Post-it notes to areas of the brain with job descriptions underneath: “pleasure center,” “memory center,” “visual center,” “beauty center.” While some version of this theory is likely true, it’s certainly not the case that any kind of mental state you can describe or intuit is cleanly localized somewhere in the brain. Still, there is excellent evidence, for example, that specific parts of the visual cortex have an exquisite selectivity for motion. Other, nonoverlapping parts are quite clearly activated only by faces. But for every careful study that finds compellingly localized brain function, there are many more that have failed to match a region with a concrete job description.

Rather than potentially add to the mix of inconclusive, underpowered studies about whether the perception of beauty is localized to some specific brain area in their recent investigation, the Tsinghua University researchers opted to do a meta-analysis. They pooled data from many already published studies to see if a consistent result emerged. The team first combed the literature for all brain-imaging studies that investigated people’s neural responses to visual art and faces and that also asked them to report on whether what they saw was beautiful or not. After reviewing the different studies, the researchers were left with data from 49 studies in total, representing experiments from 982 participants. The faces and visual art were taken to be different kinds of beautiful things, and this allowed for a conceptually straightforward test of the beauty center hypothesis. If transcendent, capital-B beauty was really something common to faces and visual art and was processed in the capital-B-beauty region of the brain, then this area should show up across studies, regardless of the specific thing being seen as beautiful. If no such region was found, then faces and visual art would more likely be, as parents say of their children, each beautiful in its own way.

The technique used to analyze the pooled data is known as activation likelihood estimation (ALE). Underneath a bit of statistical formality, it is an intuitive idea: we have more trust in things that have more votes. ALE takes each of the 49 studies to be a fuzzy, error-prone report of a specific location in the brain—roughly speaking, the particular spot that “lit up” when the experiment was conducted, together with a surrounding cloud of uncertainty. The size of this cloud of uncertainty was large if the study had few participants and small if there were many of them, thus modeling the confidence that comes from collecting more data. These 49 points and their clouds were then all merged into a composite statistical map, giving an integrated picture of brain activation across many studies and a means for saying how confident we are in the consensus across experiments. If a single small region was glowing red-hot after the merge (all clouds were small and close together), that would mean it was reliably activated across all the different studies.

Performing this analysis, the research team found that beautiful visual art and beautiful faces each reliably elicited activity in well-defined brain regions. No surprises here: it is hoped that the brain is doing something when you’re looking at a visual stimulus. The regions were almost completely nonoverlapping, however, which challenged the idea that a common beauty center was activated. If we take this at face value, then the beauty of a face is not the same as the beauty of a painting. Beauty is plural, diverse, embedded in the particulars of its medium.

It’s possible the hypothesized beauty center actually does exist and just failed to show up for a variety of methodological reasons. And to be sure, this one analysis hardly settles a question as profound and difficult as this one. Yet that raises an important point: What are we trying to accomplish here? Why do we care if beauty is one thing in the brain or 10? Would the latter make beauty 10 times more marvelous or diminish it 10-fold? More pertinent: How do we understand beauty differently if we know where to point to it in the brain? It will probably be many years, perhaps even generations, before we have something like a neuroscience of aesthetics that both physiologists and humanists will find truly compelling. But we can be sure that beauty’s seductions will keep calling us back to this messy, intriguing and unmapped place in the interim.

Jason Castro is an associate professor and chair of the neuroscience program at Bates College.

Beauty Perception and Your Brain

Apr 6, 2021

How the brain responds to beauty

Beauty is elusive, and philosophers have tried for centuries to understand it. Now scientists are trying their hand as well. And while science cannot yet tell us what beauty is, Scientific American looks at how researchers can perhaps tell us where the response to beauty is — or isn’t located in the brain.

How your brain decides what is beautiful

In his TEDMED Talk, cognitive neuroscientist Anjan Chatterjee’s research in neuroaesthetics is unraveling the intricate concept of human beauty. Dr. Chatterjee draws on tools of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and art to explain what makes someone aesthetically beautiful and why we’re drawn to beautiful people.

Neuroscience study shows memory can improve with training

Neuroaesthetics is an emerging discipline in the field of empirical aesthetics that uses neuroscience to understand how we experience beauty in different areas (art, dance, music, etc) at a neurological level. Medium explores this controversial field that continues to evolve, push boundaries, and blur the line between art and science.

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Brain, Beauty, and Art: Essays Bringing Neuroaesthetics into Focus

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Neuroscience joins the long history of discussions about aesthetics in psychology, philosophy, art history, and the creative arts. In this volume, leading scholars in this nascent field reflect on the promise of neuroaesthetics to enrich our understanding of this universal yet diverse facet of human experience. The volume will inform and stimulate anyone with an abiding interest in why it is that, across time and culture, we respond to beauty, engage with art, and are affected by music and architecture. The volume consists of essays from foundational researchers whose empirical work launched the field. Each essay is anchored to an original, peer-reviewed paper from the short history of this new and burgeoning subdiscipline of cognitive neuroscience. Authors of each essay were asked three questions: (1) What motivated the original paper? (2) What were the main findings or theoretical claims made?, and (3) How do those findings or claims fit with the current state and anticipated near future of neuroaesthetics? Together, these essays establish the territory and current boundaries of neuroaesthetics and identify its most promising future directions. Topics include models of neuroaesthetics and discussions of beauty, art, dance, music, literature, and architecture. The volume targets the general public; it also serves as an important resource for scientists, humanitarians, educators, and newcomers to the field, and it will catalyze interdisciplinary conversations critical to the maturation of this young field.

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The Brain on Beauty: Neuroaesthetics

First Online: 23 November 2019

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Rhett Diessner 2

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Semir Zeki coined the word “neuro-esthetics” (neuroaesthetics) in 1999. The first neuroaesthetic study was published in 2000 (Hansen, Brammer, & Calvert), followed by three seminal papers in 2004 (Vartanian & Goel; Kawabati & Zeki; Cela-Conde et al.). Why do we find something beautiful? Evo Psyc might be able to tell us. How do we find things beautiful? Neuroaesthetics sheds light on that. “The aesthetic triad” comprises the interaction of three neural systems to create our aesthetic experiences: the sensory-motor system, the emotion-valuation system, and the knowledge-meaning system (Chatterjee & Vartanian, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 370–375, 2014, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 172–194, 2016). Experiences of beauty involve the pleasure centers and reward circuits of the brain; pleasure may be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for experiences of beauty. The medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) may be involved in all or most experiences of beauty (Ishizu & Zeki, PLoS One e21852, 2011). However, caution is warranted in making such a claim. The meta-analytic review by Brown et al. ( NeuroImage 250–258, 2011) indicated that the right anterior insula was the main nexus of all beauty experiences but that different kinds of beauty (taste, scent, visual, auditory) were processed in different parts of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). Observing moral beauty may be simultaneously arousing and calming (activating both the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems).

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Just kidding. Buss ( 2015 ) describes eight different scientific methodologies that evolutionary psychology uses.

Sheldon the physicist from the TV show The Big Bang Theory.

The Greek word aísthēsis , from which the English word aesthetics is derived, means perception . However, here is much more to an aesthetic experience than simply perceptual pleasure. For example , Leder, Belke, Oeberst, and Augustin ( 2004 ) suggest an information processing model of aesthetic experience in five stages: (1) perception, (2) explicit classification, (3) implicit classification, (4) cognitive mastering, and (5) evaluation. I agree that all five of these processes may occur in aesthetic experience, but I disagree with them when they propose that aesthetic emotion is the output of this five-step process. I think aesthetic emotions can occur immediately after the perception stage (and the emotions from that first stage can change to other emotions by the time they get to the fifth stage or any of the other stages).

If they are correct, this has interesting implications for the evolutionary psychology of aesthetics. If we have a part of the brain that is especially dedicated to listening to music, it may mean that listening to music was adaptive and naturally selected. Music has been part and parcel of humanity for a long time.

They used positron emission tomography (PET scan), which is when you shoot someone up with radioactive sugar, and then use a kind of X-ray to see what parts of the brain are giving off the most radiation. Because our brain is only 2% of our body weight, but soaks up 20% (or more) of the sugar we consume, sugar is ideal for PET scans. I’m sure that amount of radiation isn’t enough to hurt you. Hmmm … When I was an undergrad research assistant in Barbara Gordon-Lickey’s neuroscience lab at the University of Oregon in 1979, the first paper I wrote for her (in between helping her drop electrodes into single brain cells of cats), was a review of PET scan studies. Dr. Gordon-Lickey was a student of the Nobel laureates Hubel and Wiesel at Harvard. Did we hurt the cats? No, we were very gentle. But they still lived in cages. Sad face. My wife and I took one home to rehab it after its useful lab life was over. That didn’t work too well. More sad face.

A rush, a thrill, an exhilaration, a titillation.

Hey Bob, Barber’s Adagio!

I thank Oshin Vartanian for sending me a copy of this study. He’s a generous and thoughtful guy.

I apologize for my corrupt use of the male-gaze. In my defense, my wife has been an active feminist since the 1960s and forgives me for my boringly straight sexuality. I was born this way. And then socialized this way. Although she might not forgive me for mentioning her, as she is an introvert and modest person.

Ask and ye shall receive: Ines Schindler, while reading this chapter in draft form, turned me on to a fascinating study. The researchers asked participants to select very moving clips from films. They measured crying (tears), which happens during parasympathetic activation, and goosebumps (piloerection), which occur during sympathetic activation, while the participants watched the moving clips. The tears and goosebumps often occurred together, thus showing simultaneous sympathetic and parasympathetic activation. It appears that moral beauty, and perhaps the moral emotion of elevation, may have been the causal factors: “most of our participants’ excerpts were taken from the genres of drama and romance, and hence from two genres that frequently address societal values and virtues such as altruism, bonding, self-sacrifice, faithfulness, and so forth” (Wassiliwizky , Jacobsen, Heinrich, Schneiderbauer, & Menninghaus, 2017 , p. 10).

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Beauty Interlude Three

Zephyr takes psyche to the mansion of love.

In the last interlude Psyche was about to die by jumping off the top of a craggy cliff. But just as she was about to leap, the god of the West wind, Zephyr (I love the visual and auditory aesthetics of that name) gently lifted her up and lightly set her down in the flowered valley below. She then decides to take a little nap in the dewy soft grass of the meadow (I wonder if she knew of the studies concerning naps boosting the immune system, the stability of emotions, and an increase in cognitive function. Naps rock.).

When she wakes up, she notices much natural beauty. She sees a beautiful park and garden planted with great tall trees; she sees a spring of crystal clear water. Then she notices some architectural beauty—a mansion built by divine art. She looks inside and smells the olfactory beauty of citron-wood ceilings, and beautifully carved ivory ornaments, the walls were of embossed silver. The floors were covered in beautiful mosaics of precious gems and the outer walls were built with golden bricks that shone so brightly with their own radiance that no other lights were needed in the mansion. “She looked at this with much pleasure” (Kenney, 1990 , p. 53; remember that pleasure in the brain is the typical result of experiences of beauty).

The head servant of the mansion tells her this all belongs to her (Eros had built the mansion just for her. Do you think Eros had read Buss’s [ 2015 ] research on how women like men with resources?). She then enjoys a refreshing bath (Fig. 4.3 ).

Bath of Psyche (c.1890 by Frederic, Lord Leighton) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1890s_Frederick_Leighton_-_Bath_of_Psyche.jpg . This painting is owned by the Tate museum in London. Can you believe they don’t have it on display; it’s in storage?! After much emailing and begging I received permission to visit the storage building and study this painting. In storage it is more than 10 feet off the floor and they invited me to use a wobbly 10-foot ladder so I could get close to it. I had a difficult time taking notes, as I was afraid to loosen my death grip on the ladder

Next she encounters gustatory and olfactory beauty as the servants in the mansion served her a delicious dinner; course after course of a royal banquet, a rich feast, were set before her. While the invisible servants brought her tasty dish after tasty dish, and glasses of wine like nectar, invisible singers and musicians courted her with beautiful music. Eventually she grew tired and sated and retired to the master bedroom. In the middle of the night she was awakened by a noise perhaps coming from the window casement. She thought she sensed the presence of someone and grew anxious and trembling and full of dread … And then …. (Next installment of the Myth is at the end of Chap. 5 .)

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Diessner, R. (2019). The Brain on Beauty: Neuroaesthetics. In: Understanding the Beauty Appreciation Trait. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32333-2_4

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Susan Sontag on Beauty vs. Interestingness

By maria popova.

The essay was in part inspired by Pope John Paul II’s response to the news of countless cover-ups of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church: He summoned the American cardinals to the Vatican and attempted to rationalize the situation by stating that “a great work of art may be blemished, but its beauty remains; and this is a truth which any intellectually honest critic will recognize.” In this concerning assertion as a springboard for a broader reflection on our confused attitudes toward beauty, Sontag set out to transcend the common social definition of beauty as “a gladness of the senses” and instead “to multiply the notion, to allow for kinds of beauty, beauty with adjectives, arranged on a scale of ascending value and incorruptibility.”

Sontag writes:

However much art may seem to be a matter of surface and reception by the senses, it has generally been accorded an honorary citizenship in the domain of “inner” (as opposed to “outer”) beauty. Beauty, it seems, is immutable, at least when incarnated—fixed—in the form of art, because it is in art that beauty as an idea, an eternal idea, is best embodied. Beauty (should you choose to use the word that way) is deep, not superficial; hidden, sometimes, rather than obvious; consoling, not troubling; indestructible, as in art, rather than ephemeral, as in nature. Beauty, the stipulatively uplifting kind, perdures.

Arguing that beauty has ceased to be a sufficient standard for art, that “beautiful has come to mean ‘merely’ beautiful: there is no more vapid or philistine compliment,” Sontag notes:

The subtraction of beauty as a standard for art hardly signals a decline of the authority of beauty. Rather, it testifies to a decline in the belief that there is something called art.

And yet there is more to beauty than a lackluster cultural abstraction:

Beauty defines itself as the antithesis of the ugly. Obviously, you can’t say something is beautiful if you’re not willing to say something is ugly. But there are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly. (For an explanation, look first not at the rise of so-called “political correctness,” but at the evolving ideology of consumerism, then at the complicity between these two.)

Sontag traces the paradoxical and convoluted cultural trajectory of our relationship with beauty:

That beauty applied to some things and not to others, that it was a principle of discrimination , was once its strength and its appeal. Beauty belonged to the family of notions that establish rank, and accorded well with a social order unapologetic about station, class, hierarchy, and the right to exclude. What had been a virtue of the concept became its liability. Beauty, which once seemed vulnerable because it was too general, loose, porous, was revealed as — on the contrary — excluding too much. Discrimination, once a positive faculty (meaning refined judgment, high standards, fastidiousness), turned negative: it meant prejudice, bigotry, blindness to the virtues of what was not identical with oneself. The strongest, most successful move against beauty was in the arts: beauty — and the caring about beauty — was restrictive; as the current idiom has it, elitist. Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was “interesting.”

To call something “interesting,” however, isn’t always an admission of admiration. (For a crudely illustrative example, my eighth-grade English teacher memorably used to say that “interesting is what you call an ugly baby.”) Turning to photography — perhaps the sharpest focus of Sontag’s cultural contemplation and prescient observation — she considers the complex interplay between interestingness and beauty:

[People] might describe something as interesting to avoid the banality of calling it beautiful. Photography was the art where “the interesting” first triumphed, and early on: the new, photographic way of seeing proposed everything as a potential subject for the camera. The beautiful could not have yielded such a range of subjects; and it soon came to seem uncool to boot as a judgment. Of a photograph of a sunset, a beautiful sunset, anyone with minimal standards of verbal sophistication might well prefer to say, “Yes, the photograph is interesting.”

(Curiously, Francis Bacon famously asserted that “the best part of beauty [is that] which a picture cannot express.” )

What we tend to call interesting, Sontag argues, is that which “has not previously been thought beautiful (or good).” And yet the qualitative value of “interesting” is exponentially diminished with the word’s use and overuse — something entirely unsurprising and frequently seen with terms we come to apply too indiscriminately, until they lose their original meaning. (Contemporary case in point: “curation.” ) She writes, echoing her meditation on the creative purpose of boredom from nearly four decades earlier and her concept of “aesthetic consumerism” coined shortly thereafter:

The interesting is now mainly a consumerist concept, bent on enlarging its domain: the more things become interesting, the more the marketplace grows. The boring — understood as an absence, an emptiness — implies its antidote: the promiscuous, empty affirmations of the interesting. It is a peculiarly inconclusive way of experiencing reality. In order to enrich this deprived take on our experiences, one would have to acknowledge a full notion of boredom: depression, rage (suppressed despair). Then one could work toward a full notion of the interesting. But that quality of experience — of feeling — one would probably no longer even want to call interesting.

With her strong distaste for unnecessary polarities , Sontag observes:

The perennial tendency to make of beauty itself a binary concept, to split it up into “inner” and “outer,” “higher” and “lower” beauty, is the usual way that judgments of the beautiful are colonized by moral judgments.

She counters this with a more real, more living definition of beauty:

Beauty is part of the history of idealizing, which is itself part of the history of consolation. But beauty may not always console… From a letter written by a German soldier standing guard in the Russian winter in late December 1942: “The most beautiful Christmas I had ever seen, made entirely of disinterested emotion and stripped of all tawdry trimmings. I was all alone beneath an enormous starred sky, and I can remember a tear running down my frozen cheek, a tear neither of pain nor of joy but of emotion created by intense experience.” Unlike beauty, often fragile and impermanent, the capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions. Even war, even the prospect of certain death, cannot expunge it.

Echoing young Virginia Woolf’s insight about nature, imitation, and the arts , Sontag elegantly brings her point full circle:

The responses to beauty in art and to beauty in nature are interdependent… Beauty regains its solidity, its inevitability, as a judgment needed to make sense of a large portion of one’s energies, affinities, and admirations; and the usurping notions appear ludicrous. Imagine saying, “That sunset is interesting.”

All the essays and speeches collected in At the Same Time are treasure troves of timeless wisdom on culture, art, politics, society, and the self. Complement them with Sontag on writing , boredom , sex , censorship , and aphorisms , her radical vision for remixing education , her insight on why lists appeal to us , and her illustrated meditations on art and on love .

— Published April 22, 2014 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/04/22/susan-sontag-on-beauty-vs-interestingness/ —

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Is there an Aesthetic Brain? A brief essay on the Neuroaesthetic Quantification of beauty

2021, Quantifying bodies and health. Interdisciplinary approaches

It is possible today to determine, with some precision (according to the most recent studies in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology), the areas of the brain and the neural networks involved when an individual contemplates art, when feeling pleasure, or when judging about aesthetic experience. However, many questions remain open. First, the philosophical question about the subjective nature of this kind of judgments. Then, what happens in the mind (or should it be said, in the brain?) of the beholder when contemplating art or judging in favor (or not) of the beauty of an object. And the ultimate question, if we have an aesthetic brain. Another issue that must be addressed is if bioart and especially neuroart can contribute to this analysis and if they can be effectively quantified as art. Thus, this brief essay seeks to provide some understanding about this questions but most importantly about the existence of an aesthetic brain, which may ultimately contribute to open doors to other problems of philosophy such as the hard brain-mind problem.

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This paper has a rather audacious purpose: to present a comprehensive theory explaining, and further providing hypotheses for the empirical study of, the multiple ways by which people respond to art. Despite common agreement that interaction with art can be based on a compelling, and occasionally profound, psychological experience, the nature of these interactions is still under debate. We propose a model, The Vienna Integrated Model of Art Perception (VIMAP), with the goal of resolving the multifarious processes that can occur when we perceive and interact with visual art. Specifically, we focus on the need to integrate bottom-up, artwork-derived processes, which have formed the bulk of previous theoretical and empirical assessments, with top-down mechanisms which can describe how individuals adapt or change within their processing experience, and thus how individuals may come to particularly moving, disturbing, transformative, as well as mundane, results. This is achieved by combi...

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What does it mean to be an aesthetic beholder? Is it different than simply being a perceiver? Most theories of aesthetic perception focus on 1) features of the perceived object and its presentation or 2) on psychological evaluative or emotional responses and intentions of perceiver and artist. I propose that we need to look at the process of engaged perception itself, and further that this temporal process of becoming a beholder must be understood in its embodied, contextual and dynamic specificity. Through both phenomenological and neuroscientific explorations I analyze what is characteristic about a more “aesthetic stance” and argue that there is a certain asymmetry between beholder and beheld, which has to do with a disengagement of goal-directed action, and which allows for other kinds of perceptual involvement than in a more “practical stance”. It is a multi-disciplinary project integrating a sensorimotor notion of aesthetic affordances, 18th century philosophy, and large-scale brain network findings. What ensues is a new dynamic framework that hopefully can support fruitful interdisciplinary research of aesthetic perception.

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André Aciman: Why Beauty Is So Important to Us

By André Aciman Dec. 7, 2019

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A quest for our better selves

Humans have engaged with the concept of beauty for millennia, trying to define it while being defined by it.

Plato thought that merely contemplating beauty caused “the soul to grow wings.” Ralph Waldo Emerson found beauty in Raphael’s “The Transfiguration,” writing that “a calm benignant beauty shines over all this picture, and goes directly to the heart.” In “My Skin,” Lizzo sings: “The most beautiful thing that you ever seen is even bigger than what we think it means.”

We asked a group of artists, scientists, writers and thinkers to answer this simple question: Why is beauty, however defined, so important in our lives? Here are their responses.

We’ll do anything to watch a sunset on a clear summer day at the beach. We’ll stand and stare and remain silent, as suffused shades of orange stretch over the horizon. Meanwhile, the sun, like a painter who keeps changing his mind about which colors to use, finally resolves everything with shades of pink and light yellow, before sinking, finally, into stunning whiteness.

Suddenly, we are marveled and uplifted, pulled out of our small, ordinary lives and taken to a realm far richer and more eloquent than anything we know.

Call it enchantment, the difference between the time-bound and the timeless, between us and the otherworldly. All beauty and art evoke harmonies that transport us to a place where, for only seconds, time stops and we are one with the world. It is the best life has to offer.

Under the spell of beauty, we experience a rare condition called plenitude, where we want for nothing. It isn’t just a feeling. Or if it is, then it’s a feeling like love — yes, exactly like love. Love, after all, is the most intimate thing we know. And feeling one with someone or something isn’t just an unrivaled condition, but one we do not want to live without.

We fall in love with sunsets and beaches, with tennis, with works of art, with places like Tuscany and the Rockies and the south of France, and, of course, with other people — not just because of who or what they are, but because they promise to realign us with our better selves, with the people we’ve always known we were but neglected to become, the people we crave to be before our time runs out.

André Aciman is the author of “Call Me by Your Name” and “Find Me.”

The marketing machines of modern life would have us believe that beauty is about physical attributes. With the benefit of the wisdom we have attained after many years spent traversing the planet as conservation photographers, we know otherwise.

Beauty has less to do with the material things around us, and more to do with how we spend our time on earth. We create true beauty only when we channel our energy to achieve a higher purpose, build strong communities and model our behavior so that others can find inspiration to do better by each other and our planet. Beauty has nothing to do with the latest makeup or fashion trends, and everything to do with how we live on this planet and act to protect it.

Every day we learn that species, landscapes and indigenous knowledge are vanishing before our eyes. That’s why we’ve dedicated our lives to reminding the world of the fragile beauty of our only home, and to protecting nature, not just for humanity’s sake, but for the benefit of all life on earth.

Committing our time, energy and resources to achieve these goals fills our lives with beauty.

Cristina Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen are conservation photographers and the founders of SeaLegacy .

Science enriches us by bringing us beauty in multiple forms.

Sometimes it can be found in the simplest manifestations of nature: the pattern of a nautilus shell; the colors and delicate shapes of a eucalyptus tree in full flower; the telescopic images of swirling galaxies, with their visual message of great mystery and vastness.

Sometimes it is the intricacy of the barely understood dynamics of the world’s molecules, cells, organisms and ecosystems that speaks to our imagination and wonder.

Sometimes there is beauty in the simple idea of science pursuing truth, or in the very process of scientific inquiry by which human creativity and ingenuity unveil a pattern within what had looked like chaos and incomprehensibility.

And isn’t there beauty and elegance in the fact that just four DNA nucleotides are patterned to produce the shared genetic information that underlies myriad seemingly unrelated forms of life?

Elizabeth Blackburn is a co-recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

A person’s definition of beauty is an abstract, complicated and highly personal ideal that becomes a guiding light throughout life. We crave what we consider beautiful, and that craving can easily develop into desire, which in turn becomes the fuel that propels us into action. Beauty has the power to spawn aspiration and passion, thus becoming the impetus to achieve our dreams.

In our professional lives as fashion designers, we often deal with beauty as a physical manifestation. But beauty can also be an emotional, creative and deeply spiritual force. Its very essence is polymorphic. It can take on limitless shapes, allowing us to define it by what makes the most sense to us.

We are extremely fortunate to be living at a time when so many examples of beauty are being celebrated and honored, and more inclusive and diverse standards are being set, regardless of race, gender, sexuality or creed. Individuality is beautiful. Choice is beautiful. Freedom is beautiful.

Beauty will always have the power to inspire us. It is that enigmatic, unknowable muse that keeps you striving to be better, to do better, to push harder. And by that definition, what we all need most in today’s world is perhaps simply more beauty.

Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough are the co-founders and designers of Proenza Schouler.

Beauty is just another way the tendency of our society to create hierarchies and segregate people expresses itself. The fact that over the past century certain individuals and businesses realized that it is incredibly lucrative to push upon us ever-changing beauty standards has only made things worse.

The glorification of impossible ideals is the foundation of the diet and beauty industries. And because of it, we find ourselves constantly in flux, spending however much money and time it takes to meet society’s standards. First, we didn’t want ethnic features. Now, we are all about plumping our lips and getting eye lifts in pursuit of a slanted eye. Skin-bleaching treatments and tanning creams. The ideal is constantly moving, and constantly out of reach.

The concept of beauty is a permanent obsession that permeates cultures around the world.

Jameela Jamil is an actress and the founder of the “I Weigh” movement .

The Life of Beauty

The sung blessing of creation

Led her into the human story.

That was the first beauty.

Next beauty was the sound of her mother’s voice

Rippling the waters beneath the drumming skin

Of her birthing cocoon.

Next beauty the father with kindness in his hands

As he held the newborn against his breathing.

Next beauty the moon through the dark window

It was a rocking horse, a wish.

There were many beauties in this age

For everything was immensely itself:

Green greener than the impossibility of green,

the taste of wind after its slide through dew grass at dawn,

Or language running through a tangle of wordlessness in her mouth.

She ate well of the next beauty.

Next beauty planted itself urgently beneath the warrior shrines.

Next was beauty beaded by her mother and pinned neatly

To hold back her hair.

Then how tendrils of fire longing grew into her, beautiful the flower

Between her legs as she became herself.

Do not forget this beauty she was told.

The story took her far away from beauty. In the tests of her living,

Beauty was often long from the reach of her mind and spirit.

When she forgot beauty, all was brutal.

But beauty always came to lift her up to stand again.

When it was beautiful all around and within,

She knew herself to be corn plant, moon, and sunrise.

Death is beautiful, she sang, as she left this story behind her.

Even her bones, said time.

Were tuned to beauty.

Joy Harjo is the United States poet laureate. She is the first Native American to hold the position.

Beauty is a positive and dynamic energy that has the power to convey emotion and express individuality as well as collectiveness. It can be felt through each of our senses, yet it is more magnificent when it transcends all five.

Over more than 30 years as a chef, I have experienced beauty unfolding through my cooking and in the creation of new dishes. Recipes have shown me that beauty is not a singular ingredient, object or idea, but the sum of the parts. Each dish has an appearance, a flavor, a temperature, a smell, a consistency and a nutritional value, but its triumph is the story all those parts tell together.

When my team and I launched Milan’s Refettorio Ambrosiano, our first community kitchen, in 2015, beauty was the guiding principle in our mission to nourish the homeless. We collaborated with artists, architects, designers and chefs to build a place of warmth, where gestures of hospitality and dignity would be offered to all. What I witnessed by bringing different people and perspectives around the table was the profound ability of beauty to build community. In a welcoming space, our guests had the freedom to imagine who they would like to be and begin to change their lives. In that space, beauty wielded the power of transformation.

When I visit the Refettorios that Food for Soul, the nonprofit I founded, has built around the world over the years, what strikes me as most beautiful is neither a table nor a chair nor a painting on the wall. Beauty is the spontaneity of two strangers breaking bread. It is the proud smile of a man who feels he has a place in the world. It is the emotion of that moment, and its power to fill a room with the celebration of life.

Massimo Bottura is a chef and the founder of Food for Soul .

Who wouldn’t argue that some things are objectively beautiful? Much of what we can see in the natural world would surely qualify: sunsets, snow-capped mountains, waterfalls, wildflowers. Images of these scenes, which please and soothe our senses, are among the most reproduced in all of civilization.

It’s true, of course, that we’re not the only creatures attracted to flowers. Bees and butterflies can’t resist them either — but that’s because they need flowers to survive.

Lying at the opposite end of the beauty spectrum are reptiles. They’ve had it pretty bad. Across decades of science fiction, their countenance has served as the model for a long line of ugly monsters, from Godzilla to the Creature in the “Creature From the Black Lagoon” to the Gorn in “Star Trek.”

There may be a good reason for our instinctive attraction to some things and distaste for others. If our mammalian ancestors, running underfoot, hadn’t feared reptilian dinosaurs they would have been swiftly eaten. Similarly, nearly everyone would agree that the harmless butterfly is more beautiful than the stinger-equipped bee — with the possible exception of beekeepers.

Risk of bodily harm appears to matter greatly in our collective assessment of what is or is not beautiful. Beauty could very well be a way for our senses to reassure us when we feel safe in a dangerous universe.

If so, I can’t help but wonder how much beauty lies just out of reach, hidden in plain sight, simply because we have no more than five senses with which to experience the world.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History, where he also serves as the Frederick P. Rose director of the Hayden Planetarium. He is the author of “Letters From an Astrophysicist.”

Beauty can stop us in our tracks. It can inspire us, move us, bring us to tears. Beauty can create total chaos, and then total clarity. The best kind of beauty changes hearts and minds.

That’s why the bravery of our girls is so beautiful — it can do all these things.

Over the past year, girls have moved us to tears with impassioned speeches about gun control, sexual assault and climate change. They have challenged the status quo and brought us clarity with their vision of the future. They have changed the hearts and minds of generations that are older, but not necessarily wiser.

Girls like Greta Thunberg and Isra Hirsi are fighting for the environment. Young women like Diana Kris Navarro, a Girls Who Code alumna, are leading efforts against harassment in tech. Girls like Lauren Hogg, a Parkland shooting survivor, and Thandiwe Abdullah, a Black Lives Matter activist, are speaking out against gun violence. The list goes on and on and on.

These girls are wise and brave beyond their years. They speak up because they care, not because they have the attention of a crowd or a camera. And they persist even when they’re told they’re too young, too small, too powerless — because they know they’re not.

Their bravery is beauty, redefined. And it’s what we need now, more than ever.

Reshma Saujani is the founder and chief executive of Girls Who Code and the author of “Brave, Not Perfect.”

I spend most of my waking hours (and many of my nightly dreams) thinking about beauty and its meaning. My whole life’s work has been an attempt to express beauty through design.

I see beauty as something ineffable, and I experience it in many ways. For example, I love gardening. The form and color of the flowers I tend to fill me with awe and joy. The time I spend in my garden frequently influences the shape of my gowns, as well as the objects that I choose to surround myself with. It even brings me closer to the people who have the same passion for it.

As humans, we all are more or less attuned to beauty. And because of this, we all try to engage with it one way or another — be it by being in nature, through poetry or by falling in love. And though our interaction with it can be a solitary affair, in the best cases, it connects people who share the same appreciation for it.

Beauty is what allows us to experience the extraordinary richness of our surroundings. Sensing it is like having a visa to our inner selves and the rest of the world, all at once. The interesting thing about beauty is that there is simply no downside to it: It can only enhance our lives.

Zac Posen is a fashion designer.

“The purpose of sex is procreation,” a straight cisgender man once told me, trying to defend his homophobia. “So that proves that homosexuality is scientifically and biologically wrong. It serves no purpose.”

I was quiet for a moment. “Huh,” I then said, “so … what’s the science behind blow jobs?” That shut him up real quick.

I often hear arguments that reduce human existence to a biological function, as if survival or productivity were our sole purpose, and the “bottom line” our final word. That is an attractive stance to take because it requires the least amount of energy or imagination. And for most animals, it’s the only option — the hummingbird sipping nectar is merely satisfying her hunger. She does not know her own beauty; she doesn’t have the capacity to perceive it. But we do. We enjoy art, music, poetry. We build birdfeeders. We plant flowers.

Only humans can seek out and express beauty. Why would we have this unique ability if we weren’t meant to use it? Even quarks, those fundamental parts at the core of life, were originally named after “beauty” and “truth.”

That’s why beauty matters to me. When we find beauty in something, we are making the fullest use of our biological capacities. Another way of putting it: When we become aware of life’s beauty, that’s when we are most alive.

Constance Wu is a television and film actress.

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Beauty VS. Brains

The combination of beauty and brains is not very common. However, the brain will always dominate beauty; beauty cannot win alone. First impressions are imperative in life, especially for jobs. At first glance, one can immediately see someone’s beauty, but not so much of he or she’s intelligence. However, not long after the job interview, the interviewer can quickly determine if one is fit for the job. Intelligence can be used to gain recognition in work and have a job. Remember, beauty fades over time and is fleeting, thus, people cannot depend on their looks to be successful or content. Intelligence is the key for a good education and a healthy lifestyle. Even intellects such as Miss Universe winners use their knowledge to win; beauty cannot stand alone. Actress Natalie Portman is known for starring in the Black Swan, Star Wars, and many other movies. Her beauty mesmerizes many people, but her intelligence has also contributed to her success since she graduated from Harvard University. People’s attractiveness can only get them to a certain extent in life, but intelligence, on the other hand, is more important in the long run. Wit, intelligence, and perception are the factors that aid us in life.

Today’s society has the wrong obsession; the latest trend and trying to become the unrealistic image of “beauty.” We seem to forget the wealth of human knowledge and wisdom. In the present world, there are many ways to buy beauty in the form of facial and plastic surgery, whereas medical treatment cannot enhance one’s mind to become more acute and perspicacious. The current generation needs to perpetuate the intelligence level, not ignorance, for the sake of everyone and the future.

External looks alone cannot succeed. The brain undoubtedly can excel in comparison to only beauty. Take a look at the most successful and richest people in history and in the world; they are the ones who are bright and clever.

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Essays About Beauty: Top 5 Examples and 10 Prompts

Writing essays about beauty is complicated because of this topic’s breadth. See our examples and prompts to you write your next essay.

Beauty is short for beautiful and refers to the features that make something pleasant to look at. This includes landscapes like mountain ranges and plains, natural phenomena like sunsets and aurora borealis, and art pieces such as paintings and sculptures. However, beauty is commonly attached to an individual’s appearance, fashion, or cosmetics style, which appeals to aesthetical concepts. Because people’s views and ideas about beauty constantly change , there are always new things to know and talk about.

Below are five great essays that define beauty differently. Consider these examples as inspiration to come up with a topic to write about.

1. Essay On Beauty – Promise Of Happiness By Shivi Rawat

2. defining beauty by wilbert houston, 3. long essay on beauty definition by prasanna, 4. creative writing: beauty essay by writer jill, 5. modern idea of beauty by anonymous on papersowl, 1. what is beauty: an argumentative essay, 2. the beauty around us, 3. children and beauty pageants, 4. beauty and social media, 5. beauty products and treatments: pros and cons, 6. men and makeup, 7. beauty and botched cosmetic surgeries, 8. is beauty a necessity, 9. physical and inner beauty, 10. review of books or films about beauty.

“In short, appreciation of beauty is a key factor in the achievement of happiness, adds a zest to living positively and makes the earth a more cheerful place to live in.”

Rawat defines beauty through the words of famous authors, ancient sayings, and historical personalities. He believes that beauty depends on the one who perceives it. What others perceive as beautiful may be different for others. Rawat adds that beauty makes people excited about being alive.

“No one’s definition of beauty is wrong. However, it does exist and can be seen with the eyes and felt with the heart.”

Check out these essays about best friends .

Houston’s essay starts with the author pointing out that some people see beauty and think it’s unattainable and non-existent. Next, he considers how beauty’s definition is ever-changing and versatile. In the next section of his piece, he discusses individuals’ varying opinions on the two forms of beauty: outer and inner.

At the end of the essay, the author admits that beauty has no exact definition, and people don’t see it the same way. However, he argues that one’s feelings matter regarding discerning beauty. Therefore, no matter what definition you believe in, no one has the right to say you’re wrong if you think and feel beautiful.

“The characteristic held by the objects which are termed “beautiful” must give pleasure to the ones perceiving it. Since pleasure and satisfaction are two very subjective concepts, beauty has one of the vaguest definitions.”

Instead of providing different definitions, Prasanna focuses on how the concept of beauty has changed over time. She further delves into other beauty requirements to show how they evolved. In our current day, she explains that many defy beauty standards, and thinking “everyone is beautiful” is now the new norm.

“…beauty has stolen the eye of today’s youth. Gone are the days where a person’s inner beauty accounted for so much more then his/her outer beauty.”

This short essay discusses how people’s perception of beauty today heavily relies on physical appearance rather than inner beauty. However, Jill believes that beauty is all about acceptance. Sadly, this notion is unpopular because nowadays, something or someone’s beauty depends on how many people agree with its pleasant outer appearance. In the end, she urges people to stop looking at the false beauty seen in magazines and take a deeper look at what true beauty is.

“The modern idea of beauty is taking a sole purpose in everyday life. Achieving beautiful is not surgically fixing yourself to be beautiful, and tattoos may have a strong meaning behind them that makes them beautiful.”

Beauty in modern times has two sides: physical appearance and personality. The author also defines beauty by using famous statements like “a woman’s beauty is seen in her eyes because that’s the door to her heart where love resides” by Audrey Hepburn. The author also tackles the issue of how physical appearance can be the reason for bullying, cosmetic surgeries, and tattoos as a way for people to express their feelings.

Looking for more? Check out these essays about fashion .

10 Helpful Prompts To Use in Writing Essays About Beauty

If you’re still struggling to know where to start, here are ten exciting and easy prompts for your essay writing:

While defining beauty is not easy, it’s a common essay topic. First, share what you think beauty means. Then, explore and gather ideas and facts about the subject and convince your readers by providing evidence to support your argument.

If you’re unfamiliar with this essay type, see our guide on how to write an argumentative essay .

Beauty doesn’t have to be grand. For this prompt, center your essay on small beautiful things everyone can relate to. They can be tangible such as birds singing or flowers lining the street. They can also be the beauty of life itself. Finally, add why you think these things manifest beauty.

Little girls and boys participating in beauty pageants or modeling contests aren’t unusual. But should it be common? Is it beneficial for a child to participate in these competitions and be exposed to cosmetic products or procedures at a young age? Use this prompt to share your opinion about the issue and list the pros and cons of child beauty pageants.

Essays About Beauty: Beauty and social media

Today, social media is the principal dictator of beauty standards. This prompt lets you discuss the unrealistic beauty and body shape promoted by brands and influencers on social networking sites. Next, explain these unrealistic beauty standards and how they are normalized. Finally, include their effects on children and teens.

Countless beauty products and treatments crowd the market today. What products do you use and why? Do you think these products’ marketing is deceitful? Are they selling the idea of beauty no one can attain without surgeries? Choose popular brands and write down their benefits, issues, and adverse effects on users.

Although many countries accept men wearing makeup, some conservative regions such as Asia still see it as taboo. Explain their rationale on why these regions don’t think men should wear makeup. Then, delve into what makeup do for men. Does it work the same way it does for women? Include products that are made specifically for men.

There’s always something we want to improve regarding our physical appearance. One way to achieve such a goal is through surgeries. However, it’s a dangerous procedure with possible lifetime consequences. List known personalities who were pressured to take surgeries because of society’s idea of beauty but whose lives changed because of failed operations. Then, add your thoughts on having procedures yourself to have a “better” physique.

People like beautiful things. This explains why we are easily fascinated by exquisite artworks. But where do these aspirations come from? What is beauty’s role, and how important is it in a person’s life? Answer these questions in your essay for an engaging piece of writing.

Beauty has many definitions but has two major types. Discuss what is outer and inner beauty and give examples. Tell the reader which of these two types people today prefer to achieve and why. Research data and use opinions to back up your points for an interesting essay.

Many literary pieces and movies are about beauty. Pick one that made an impression on you and tell your readers why. One of the most popular books centered around beauty is Dave Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon , first published in 1993. What does the author want to prove and point out in writing this book, and what did you learn? Are the ideas in the book still relevant to today’s beauty standards? Answer these questions in your next essay for an exiting and engaging piece of writing.

Grammar is critical in writing. To ensure your essay is free of grammatical errors, check out our list of best essay checkers .

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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Beauty or Brain - who can rule the world?
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Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world?

plylsjnccg -vohfbmhai (10/03/23)
http://dokobo.ru/gdm-careerride.com-wfg.xml
RE: Beauty or Brain - who can rule the world? -niyaone (12/14/19)
Intelligence, hands down, is more important than beauty. Intelligence can inspire you to be a better person and educate yourself about the world around you and how to make it a better place. Intelligence never fades. Intelligence is inner beauty
RE: Beauty or Brain - who can rule the world? -shirlyn (04/27/18)
i believe that brains are better because it could get you a better paying job and help you with taxes.
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -Anantha TZAK krishnan (10/19/16)
Beauty and brain need to go hand in hand (in humans that is, no point trying to make a beautiful rock or flower intelligent). Beauty doesn't only mean the external appearance of a person it also means the beauty of the soul. The beauty of a person maybe his intelligence
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -Samantha TZAK krishnan (10/19/16)
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -deepali baunthiyal (01/20/16)
hi friends. the topic beauty or brain is definitely intresting and requires a lot of brain to think over it. I did read all the replies and pretty much every reply talks brain over beauty as one perspective so i would like to talk about other beauty over brain. Beauty itself has a very wide scope, limiting it with just external appearance is not a wise choice. Its only the way one perceive it .foreg for some, being intelligent is a beauty. how one talks, walks, behave, thinks etc all determines beauty. Brain with wise thoughts and intellect is considered beautiful. People who are kind and generous are beautiful. Its not necesssary that every one is born genius but everyone can be beautiful just by mending some of its habits. Maybe thats the reason why humans tend to find beauty in every thing be it nature, people or nonliving objects. Beauty provides peace and tranquility to a person thats why a spiritually enlighted soul is considered beautiful.And not to forget GOD is beautiful, truth is beautiful, love is beautiful and all emotions that tend to make you live even for a day more is beautiful. As Keat said "truth is beauty, beauty is truth...ye all know on earth and all ye need to know".
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -vighnesh (12/03/15)
in my point of view brain can rule the world with beauty some time without beauty also.so brain is more important any person without any skill or they cant achieve anything. For example a beautiful brain damage girl can able to rule the world? No it not possible thats i am telling brain is important. for example rahul gandi looks smart than modi but modi is brilliant than rahul thats why he is in ruling.
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -Bhoopathy (10/07/15)
It is an nice topic... It is very useful to my GD
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -robin (10/01/15)
Yes....I like this topic This topic provides the knowledge about their future that don't waste your time to increase their physical beauty . It tells us to become smart.......and shine like sun......
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -atanu dey (09/28/15)
common man this is 21st century and what discussion we r doing at present.......the person who supports the beauty i would ask them.....whether there r any exm which is applicable only to beautiful person?...any invention which are present with us....is there something like that noooo we r not going to use that because the person was not a beautyful one....infact beauty is also not required in modelling because that tooo have some ugly person but good physique..
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -Lavanya (09/28/15)
Both beauty nd brain has importance,but brain s rules,,, if we talk about the today's world brain plays very important rule the great person Dr APJ abdul kalam had not that beauty but his achievements are great,so according to me brain rules the world
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -Avinash singh (09/26/15)
Beauty is god gifted which given to less percentage of people to survive and it is benficial when u dont know about any thing and you will bwbgiven priority. But brain is to be sharped by human beings theirfore brain always leads
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -vasu (09/26/15)
greatly expressed...........
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -Dipanjali (09/26/15)
Accordn to me brain is very much required to ruled d world bcoz beauty nly attract d attention bt Gd behaviour or gd attitude dt z drastically win d people heart n dt gd attitude is nly controlled by mynd or brain .
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -Dayanand NI (09/06/15)
Beauty is not important in the job field if you have good knowledge about your work than only you easily lead your life according my brain is very important batter then beauty
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -jaki jain (09/03/15)
frds in my point of view beauty with brain is necessary. becoz of if u hav beauty, ok u rule the world but only for sometimes becoz in this era compitition is much so u try to lead this compititon but how? by using brain.. nd I m also in fevour of a person having only brain.brainy man can't stop in any field . so in this generation people can't stay or face without brain.
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -Dr. Iftikhar Ahmad (09/03/15)
Neither beauty nor brain can rule the world.History tells us that a combination of brain beauty and bravery whenever gathered in one person that person was ruling the world at that time.
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -anish avishkar (08/16/15)
one sentence - BEAUTY WITHOUT BRAIN IS NOT BEAUTY ...lolz
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -himanshu vyas (08/16/15)
it was very helpful to me.
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -anbu (07/16/15)
this topic is very nice and intresting...I thoughts we want both beauty and brain.but only brain can solve all problem in the world not a beauty.and who can has brain they should achive the requirments and aften moving the life and world
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -romendra (07/11/15)
beauty is a natural so however it cannot say that beauty person is always sucessful ex obama is not a beautiful however he is a strong leadership by sharp brain
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -Barry Allen (07/11/15)
Rule the world? Does that mean what brings more sucess? Let me tell that beauty is not far behind than in bringing success. But that success doesnt last long. Although success achieved by brain always long lasting, or life long and also respect earned is genuine. Beauty also depends on luck as a famous statement "Beauty lies in eyes of beholder". Although beauty can be starter/initiator of success, as we know "first impression is the Last impression" so beauty makes things easy further. Brain's entry without beauty in journey of success is difficult but one it enters and recognised, it stays for long. And a combo of both brain and beauty is deadly and the one has it will taste the success easily. Conclusion: Beauty can rule the world for short while but Brain once recognised, rules till eternity example Albert Einstein and many more scientists.
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -Subhosree Pan (07/09/15)
if it comes between beauty and brain , brain will score more ! All the comforts , technologies we are enjoying today is the gift of brain ! the ultimate judgment of a person should be done by judging his mind. this thinking power is also comes from brain. It can be said that brain is ultimate requirement for surviving and beauty adds some bonus points !
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -Bharathi YamakoTi (07/07/15)
Its really an interesting one. In my point of view, brain plays a prominent role in our life. For example,ambani's family is one of the richest family in india because of their talent .but not due to their beauty.
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -naveen kumar (06/29/15)
beauty or brain a person beauty with brain it make confidence to get achived the goals but not all the time beauty saves us in the socity without having brain
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -Shashank Tiwari (06/27/15)
Nepolian , the great emperor and one of the biggest ruler; he was the ugliest man of his time as told in history...clearly means their is no doubt of superiorty of brain over beauty.Beauty whether its internal or external without brain it cant get anything ...just a symbol of natural beauty for entertaining others not to rule over them as seen in daily life.With the use of brain one can get any breakthrough throughout the life.
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -Valerie Thierry (06/17/15)
To have beauty and brains both working in one's favor is a wonderful thing. But if given a choice between the two without a seconds hesitation I will truly select to be the pretty one. I am not saying its okay to be pretty and ignorant but I don't need to be a genius long as I have a normal I.Q. with that lovely face. There's nothing like experience and I have lived in both worlds what it is like to be attractive and what its like not to be. And yes indeed I can relate to the horrible stories of being tormented in my past as the ugly duckling but now my face is on Covergirls testboard. when you go from unattractive to attractive or even visa-versa its like entering into a twilight zone sort of thing. I even as a writer have started to write something pertaining to beauty and call it "On The Attractive Side of the Fence." Receiving compliments and turning heads and being looked upon an admiring way is a whole lot of fun unlike the Charlie Brown life as I have once known it, I do not want to be reminded of what I once looked like but you can see several images of my look at me now life if you go to: www:exploretalent.com/valeriethierry1
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -Latha (06/17/15)
Beauty and brain are very important in everyone's life.we can achieve success through them.some of the film actors are getting success through beauty.Everyone who are intelligent will also achieve success.But the success through beauty remains for only sometime and through brain remains forever.
RE: Beauty or Brain – who can rule the world? -thedi (06/17/15)
nice topic and i completely agree brain cannot be bought but beauty can,if you have a good brain you can buy beauty then both are there ,but always remember brain and intelligence is important than beauty.......