Friday, January 15, 2010

Beauty in Reality

I was over on The Presurfer blog today, originally to check out one of the coolest sweater vests ever created, but I found this picture:

The post claims that by carefully combining the features of 16 attractive women, you get the most beautiful woman. (Take a closer look at the shot here.)

I found the PhotoShop skills fascinating, but I strongly disagree with their conclusion. The final fictitious woman is very attractive. But she's not the most beautiful woman in the world. In fact, I'd say she's not as attractive as their first 16 picks.

By combining all the women's faces, they took away the "flaws" that make the personality, that take the appeal from "that's nice" to "wow!" The final product is a vapid plain face of decent proportions with a good deal of makeup on.

(Oddly, she doesn't have perfect proportions. Of those 16 women, the majority have higher arching right eyebrows. I don't know what to make of that.)

Anyway, I wasn't really going anywhere with this post, only that I saw the picture this morning and I've been thinking about it all day.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Totally and absolutely agree. How can you determine beauty if there's nothing to make it unique or have contrast to something else?

Rebecca Chastain said...

AFY, I agree completely. Very well said!