The Science of Beauty

7/24/2019 The Science of Beauty

1/12

7/1/13 The Science of Beauty | Brain Pickings

www.brainpicking s.org/index.php/2013/07/01/survival-of-the-prettiest-nancy-ectoff/ 1/12

Search

about

support

contact

bookshelf

newsletter

literary jukebox

sounds

newsletter

Brain Pickingshas a free

weekly interestingness digest.It comes out on Sundays and

offers the week's best

articles. Here's an example.

Like? Sign up.

Name

Email

subscribe

donating = loving

Brain Pickingsremainsad-free

and takes hundreds of hours

amonth to research and

write, and thousands of

dollars to sustain. If you find

any joy and value in it, please

consider becoming a Member

and supporting with a

recurring monthly donation

of your choosing, between a

cup of tea and a good dinner:

$7 / month

You can also become a one-

time patron with a single

donation in any amount:

labors of love

The Science of Beautyby Maria Popova

Attitudes toward beauty are entwined with our deepest

conflicts surrounding flesh and spirit.

That is the best part of beauty, which a picture

cannot express,Francis Bacon observed in his

essay on the subject. And yet for as far back as

humanity can peer into the past, weve

attempted again and again to capture and define

beauty. For Indian philosopher Tagore, beauty

was the Truth of eternity. For Richard Feynman,

it was the mesmerism of complexity. For E. B.

White, it was the power of simplicity. For the

influential early art theorist Denman Waldo

Ross, it was a supreme instance of order.For

legendary philosopher Denis Dutton, it was a

gift handed down from the intelligent skills and

rich emotional lives of our most ancient

ancestors.But despite all these metaphysical explanations, we c ontinue to

strive for a concrete, tangible, material answer.

Thats precisely what Harvards Nancy Etcoffsets out to unearth in Survival ofthe Prettiest: The Science of Beauty(public library) an inquiry into what we

find beautiful and why that frames beauty as the workings of a basic instinct

and explores such fascinating facets of the subject as our evolutionary wiring,

the ubiquitous response to beauty across human cultures, and the universal

qualities in people that evoke this response.

7/24/2019 The Science of Beauty

2/12

7/1/13 The Science of Beauty | Brain Pickings

www.brainpicking s.org/index.php/2013/07/01/survival-of-the-prettiest-nancy-ectoff/ 2/12

Etcoff begins by confronting our intellectual apologism for the cult of beauty:

Many intellectuals would have us believe that beauty is

inconsequential. Since it explains nothing, solves nothing,

and teaches us nothing, it should not have a place in

intellectual discourse. And we are supposed to breathe a

collective sigh of relief. After all, the concept of beauty has

become an embarrassment.

But there is something wrong with this picture. Outside the

realm of ideas, beauty rules. Nobody has stopped looking atit, and no one has stopped enjoying the sight. Turning a cold

eye to beauty is as easy as quelling physical desire or

responding with indifference to a babys cry. We can say

that beauty is dead, but all that does is widen the chasm

between the real world and our understanding of it.

7/24/2019 The Science of Beauty

3/12

7/1/13 The Science of Beauty | Brain Pickings

www.brainpicking s.org/index.php/2013/07/01/survival-of-the-prettiest-nancy-ectoff/ 3/12

must-reads

HOWTOFINDYOURPURPOSEANDDO

WHATYOULOVE

Etcoff admonishes against confusing beauty with all the manufactured and

industriously exploited stand-ins for it:

Madison Avenue cleverly exploits universal preferences but it

does not create them, any more than Walt Disney created

our fondness for creatures with big eyes and little limbs, orCoca-Cola or McDonalds created our cravings for sweet or

fatty foods. Advertisers and businessmen help to define what

adornments we wear and find beautiful, but this belongs

to our sense of fashion, which is not the same thing as our

sense of beauty.

If everyone were cast in the same mould, there would be no such thing as

beauty, Darwin famously reflected, and Etcoff echoes his admonition in

turning to the menacing domino effect of this proposition in action and what it

robs us of:

The media channel desire and narrow the bandwidth of our

preferences. A crowd-pleasing image becomes a mold, and a

beauty is followed by her imitator, and then by the imitator of

7/24/2019 The Science of Beauty

4/12

7/1/13 The Science of Beauty | Brain Pickings

www.brainpicking s.org/index.php/2013/07/01/survival-of-the-prettiest-nancy-ectoff/ 4/12

FAILSAFE: COURAGEANDTHECREATIVE

LIFE

FAMOUSWRITERSONWRITING

HOWTOSTAYSANE

CULTURALICONSONTHEMEANINGOFLIFE

ALBERTEINSTEINONTHESECRETTO

LEARNINGANYTHING

THEBESTBOOKSOF2012

her imitator. Marilyn Monroe was such a crowd pleaser that

shes been imitated by everyone from Jayne Mansfield to

Madonna. Racism and class snobbery are reflected in images

of beauty, although beauty itself is indifferent to race and

thrives on diversity.

One of the most fascinating aspects of beauty, however, is how bound it is with

judgment, and self-judgment in particular. One of the products of our

narcissistic bias, Etcoff argues, is that we greatly exaggerate the minute

fluctuations in our outward appearance:

To the outside world we vary in small ways from our best

hours to our worst. In our minds eye, however, we undergo

a kaleidoscope of changes, and a bad hair day, a blemish, or

an added pound undermines our confidence in ways that

equally minor fluctuations in our moods, our strength, or

our mental agility usually do not.

7/24/2019 The Science of Beauty

5/12

7/1/13 The Science of Beauty | Brain Pickings

www.brainpicking s.org/index.php/2013/07/01/survival-of-the-prettiest-nancy-ectoff/ 5/12

THEDAILYROUTINESOFFAMOUSWRITERS

5 ESSENTIALBOOKSONFEARANDTHE

CREATIVEPROCESS

10 TIPSONWRITINGFROMDAVIDOGILVY

9 BOOKSTOHELPYOUREADMOREAND

WRITEBETTER

JOHNCLEESEONTHE5 FACTORSTOMAKE

YOURLIFEMORECREATIVE

JOANDIDIONONKEEPINGANOTEBOOK

Equally, we direct our real-time assessments of appearance towards others:

We are always sizing up other peoples looks: our beauty

detectors never close up shop and call it a day. We notice

the attractiveness of each face we see as automatically as

we register whether or not they look familiar. Beauty

detectors scan the environment like radar: we can see a face

for a fraction of a second (150 msec. in one psychology

experiment) and rate its beauty, even give it the same ratingwe would give it on longer inspection. Long after we forget

many important details about a person, our initial response

stays in our memory.

She traces the cross-cultural, age-old extremes to which people go for beauty

or, really, for control of those judgments, whether by self or others:

In Brazil there are more Avon ladies than members of the

army. In the United States more money is spent on beauty

than on education or social services. Tons of makeup1,484

tubes of lipstick and 2,055 jars of skin care productsare

sold every minute. During famines, Kalahari bushmen in

Africa still use animal fats to moisturize their skin, and in 1715

riots broke out in France when the use of flour on the hair

of aristocrats led to a food shortage. The hoarding of flour

for beauty purposes was only quelled by the FrenchRevolution.

But our fixation on beauty is so profound that it even permeates the most

7/24/2019 The Science of Beauty

6/12

7/1/13 The Science of Beauty | Brain Pickings

www.brainpicking s.org/index.php/2013/07/01/survival-of-the-prettiest-nancy-ectoff/ 6/12

100 IDEASTHATCHANGEDGRAPHIC

DESIGN

7 MUST-READBOOKSONTHEART&

SCIENCEOFHAPPINESS

RICHARDDAWKINSONEVIDENCEIN

SCIENCE, LIFEANDLOVE: A LETTERTO

HIS10-YEAR-OLDDAUGHTER

CREATIVECARTOGRAPHY: 7 MUST-READ

BOOKSONMAPS

CARLSAGANONSCIENCEAND

SPIRITUALITY

JOHNSTEINBECKONFALLINGINLOVE: A

elevated of human spirits. Etcoff gives Eleanor Roosevelt, one of historys most

remarkable hearts and minds, and Leo Tolstoy, enduring sage of human

wisdom, as tragic examples:

When Eleanor Roosevelt was asked if she had any regrets,

her response was a poignant one: she wished she had been

prettier. It is a sobering statement from one of the most

revered and beloved of women, one who surely led a life with

many satisfactions. She is not uttering just a womanslament. In Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, Leo Tolstoy wrote, I

was frequently subject to moments of despair. I imagined

that there was no happiness on earth for a man with such a

wide nose, such thick lips, and such tiny gray eyes as mine.

Nothing has such a striking impact on a mans

development as his appearance, and not so much his actual

appearance as a conviction that it is either attractive or

unattractive.

(It is especially ironic and demonstrative of the oppressive power of such idealsthat Roosevelt famously wrote, When you adopt the standards and the values of

someone else you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your

surrender, less of a human being.)

Still, the mesmerism of beauty and its grip on us, Etcoff argues, is too deep-

seated to be undone by its mere intellectual recognition:

Appearance is the most public part of the self. It is our

sacrament, the visible self that the world assumes to be a

mirror of the invisible, inner self. This assumption may not be

fair, and not how the best of all moral worlds would conduct

itself. But that does not make it any less true. Beauty has

consequences that we cannot erase by denial. Beauty will

continue to operate outside jurisdiction, in the lawless

world of human attraction. Academics may ban it from

intelligent discourse and snobs may sniff that beauty is trivialand shallow but in the real world the beauty myth quickly

collides with reality.

Framing beauty as a basic pleasure, Etcoff argues that our response to it is

7/24/2019 The Science of Beauty

7/12

7/1/13 The Science of Beauty | Brain Pickings

www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/07/01/survival-of-the-prettiest-nancy-ectoff/ 7/12

1958 LETTER

7 OBSCURECHILDRENSBOOKSBY

FAMOUSAUTHORSOFADULTLITERATURE

WHYWELOVE: 5 BOOKSONTHE

PSYCHOLOGYOFLOVE

7 MUST-READBOOKSONMUSIC,

EMOTION& THEBRAIN

BERTRANDRUSSELL'S10 COMMANDMENTS

OFTEACHING

5 TIMELESSCOMMENCEMENTSPEECHES

TOTEACHYOUTODEFINEYOUROWN

SUCCESS

explore

activism advertising

actually the sign of a healthy human mind. Conversely, the absence of such a

response is one of the key symptoms of severe depression, one that goes hand-

in-hand with anhedonia the inability to take pleasure in things that once

pleased us.

Although the objectof beauty is debated, the experience of

beauty is not. Beauty can stir up a snarl of emotions but

pleasure must always be one (tortured longings and envy are

not incompatible with pleasure). Our body responds to itviscerally and our names for beauty are synonymous with

physical cataclysms and bodily obliteration breathtaking,

femme fatale, knockout, drop-dead gorgeous, bombshell,

stunner, and ravishing. We experience beauty not as rational

contemplation but as a response to physical urgency.

She offers some exquisite examples of beautys contemplation from the annals

7/24/2019 The Science of Beauty

8/12

7/1/13 The Science of Beauty | Brain Pickings

www.brainpicking s.org/index.php/2013/07/01/survival-of-the-prettiest-nancy-ectoff/ 8/12

animation artbooks children'sbooks collaboration

creativity

culture datavisualization designdocumentary

education film foodhappiness historyillustrationinnovation interview

knowledge letters

literature love maps

music neuroscienceomnibus philosophyphotography poetrypolitics

psychology remixscience social websoftware sustainability

technology TEDvideo vintage vintagechildren's books world writing

of literary history:

The most lyrical description of an encounter with beauty

solitary, spontaneous, with an unknown othercomes in

James Joyces Portrait of the Artist as a Young Manwhen

Stephen Dedalus sees a young woman standing by the

shore with long, slender bare legs, and a face touched

with the wonder of mortal beauty. Her beauty is

transformative and gives form to his sensual and spirituallongings. Her image had passed into his soul for ever and

no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. A wild

angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and

beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open

before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways

of error and glory. On and on and on and on!

Ezra Pound had a moment of recognition that inspired him

to write a two-line poem In a station at the Mtro, which

comprised these brief sentences: The apparition of these

faces in the crowd: Petals, on a wet, black bough. Later,Pound described how he came to write it. Three years ago

in Paris I got out of a Mtro train at La Concorde, and saw

suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and

then a beautiful childs face, and then another beautiful

woman, and I tried all day to find words for what this had

meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to

me worthy or as lovely as that sudden emotion. In a

poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant

when a thing outward and objective transforms itself or

darts into a thing inward and subjective.

Etcoff argues that we each possess an intrinsic beauty template that we intuit,

against which we measure everything we observe:

People judge appearances as though somewhere in their

minds an ideal beauty of the human form exists, a form they

would recognize if they saw it, though they do not expect

they ever will. It exists in the imagination.

[]

The human image has been subjected to all manner of

manipulation in an attempt to create an ideal that does not

seem to have a human incarnation. When Zeuxis painted

Helen of Troy he gathered five of the most beautiful living

women and represented features of each in the hope of

capturing and depicting her beauty. There are no actual

descriptions of Helen, nor of other legendary beauties such

as Dantes Beatrice. Their faces are blank slates, Rorschach

inkblot tests of our imaginings of the features of perfect

beauty.

7/24/2019 The Science of Beauty

9/12

7/1/13 The Science of Beauty | Brain Pickings

www.brainpicking s.org/index.php/2013/07/01/survival-of-the-prettiest-nancy-ectoff/ 9/12

But as unique as we would like to think we are, these inner templates turn out to

be far more uniform. Etcoff cites the work of anthropometrist Leslie Farkas,

who measured the facial proportions of 200 women, including 50 models, as

well as young males and kids, and asked a large sample of participants to rate

their appearance, then compared the results with the conventions of the

classical beauty canon. The surprising findings, Etcoff argues, illustrates how

measurement systems have failed at producing a formula for beauty and instead

reveal something profound about the brokenness of the prescriptive canon:

The canon did not fare well. Many of the measures did not

turn out to be important, such as the relative angles of the

ear and nose. Some seemed pure idealizations: none of the

faces and heads in profile corresponded to equal halves or

thirds or fourths. Some were inaccuratethe distance

between the eyes of the beauties was greater than that

suggested by the canon (the width of the nose). Farkass

7/24/2019 The Science of Beauty

10/12

7/1/13 The Science of Beauty | Brain Pickings

www.brainpicking s.org/index.php/2013/07/01/survival-of-the-prettiest-nancy-ectoff/ 10/12

results do not mean that a beautiful face will never match the

Renaissance and classical ideals. But they do suggest that

classical artists might have been wrong about the

fundamental nature of human beauty. Perhaps they thought

there was a mathematical ideal because this fit in a general

way with platonic or religious ideas about the origin of the

world.

And yet beauty is a very real piece of the human experience and bespeaks some

of our greatest existential tensions, such as the mortality paradox. Etcoff

writes:

Attitudes toward beauty are entwined with our deepest

conflicts surrounding flesh and spirit. We view the body as a

temple, a prison, a dwelling for the immortal soul, a

tormentor, a garden of earthly delights, a biological envelope,

a machine, a home. We cannot talk about our response to

our bodys beauty without understanding all that we project

onto our flesh.

Though at first glance borderline reductionist in its excessive reliance onevolutionary explanations, the rest of Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of

Beautygoes on demonstrate why science and philosophy need each otherand

how the social sciences fit into the intellectual debate on beauty. Complement it

with Etcoffs compelling TED talk on the surprising science of happiness a

fine addition to these essential reads on the art and science of happiness in

which she explores the evolutionary explanations of beauty:

7/24/2019 The Science of Beauty

11/12

7/1/13 The Science of Beauty | Brain Pickings

www.brainpicking s.org/index.php/2013/07/01/survival-of-the-prettiest-nancy-ectoff/ 11/12

TweetTweet

1069

Play video

Nancy Etcoff

Happiness and its surprises

DownloadShare

Embed

Close

Video

Donating = Loving

Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If

you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting

Member with a recurring monthly donationof your choosing, between a cup oftea and a good dinner:

$7 / month

You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out onSundays and offers the weeks best articles. Heres what toexpect. Like? Sign up.

Like 294

162

TAGS: BOOKS CULTURE PSYCHOLOGY SCIENCE WOMEN

You might also enjoy:

7/24/2019 The Science of Beauty

12/12

7/1/13 The Science of Beauty | Brain Pickings

Brain Pickingspartici pates in the Amazon Services LL C Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to pro vide a means for sites to earncommi ssions by linking to Amazon. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book on Amaz on from a li nk on here, I get a small

percentage of its price. That helps supportBrain Pickingsby offsetting a fraction of what it takes to maintain the site, and is very much appreciated.

Brain Pickings Subscribe

RSS

email

Design by:Josh Boston

Gorgeous Vintage

Soviet Propaganda

and Art Posters

On Scientific Taste Michele Banks'

Biological

Watercolors

A Poetic Definition of

Science Circa 1997