Posts matching tags 'beauty'
2007/12/6
The latest minority (or perhaps majority) demanding justice is the ugly (or perhaps Ugly). At least in Buenos Aires, a city famous for its beautiful people and fastidious attention to appearances. Ugly Liberation activist Gonzalo Otalora is campaigning for taxes on beautiful people to offset the advantage they get from their appearance.
It seems that Ugly Pride may be an idea whose time has finally come. As the Ugly assert their identity, perhaps the next battle will be against discriminatory phrases like "an ugly situation".
(via 
mysterbey) ¶ [no comments]
2006/11/10
An argument that the abundance of images of attractive people causes widespread unhappiness:
Psychologists Sara Gutierres, Ph.D., and Douglas Kenrick, Ph.D., both of Arizona State University, demonstrated that the contrast effect operates powerfully in the sphere of person-to-person attraction as well. In a series of studies over the past two decades, they have shown that, more than any of us might suspect, judgments of attractiveness (of ourselves and of others) depend on the situation in which we find ourselves. For example, a woman of average attractiveness seems a lot less attractive than she actually is if a viewer has first seen a highly attractive woman. If a man is talking to a beautiful female at a cocktail party and is then joined by a less attractive one, the second woman will seem relatively unattractive.
Psychologists Sara Gutierres, Ph.D., and Douglas Kenrick, Ph.D., both of Arizona State University, demonstrated that the contrast effect operates powerfully in the sphere of person-to-person attraction as well. In a series of studies over the past two decades, they have shown that, more than any of us might suspect, judgments of attractiveness (of ourselves and of others) depend on the situation in which we find ourselves. For example, a woman of average attractiveness seems a lot less attractive than she actually is if a viewer has first seen a highly attractive woman. If a man is talking to a beautiful female at a cocktail party and is then joined by a less attractive one, the second woman will seem relatively unattractive.
The strange thing is, being bombarded with visions of beautiful women (or for women, socially powerful men) doesn't make us think our partners are less physically attractive. It doesn't change our perception of our partner. Instead, by some sleight of mind, it distorts our idea of the pool of possibilities.
Our minds have not caught up. They haven't evolved to correct for MTV. "Our research suggests that our brains don't discount the women on the cover of Cosmo even when subjects know these women are models. Subjects judge an average attractive woman as less desirable as a date after just having seen models," Kenrick says.
So the women men count as possibilities are not real possibilities for most of them. That leads to a lot of guys sitting at home alone with their fantasies of unobtainable supermodels, stuck in a secret, sorry state that makes them unable to access real love for real women. Or, as Kenrick finds, a lot of guys on college campuses whining, "There are no attractive women to date."This effect apparently manifests itself in higher rates of divorce or persistent singleness due to people exposed to quantities of images of attractiveness their brains are not evolutionarily adapted to, and thus developing dissatisfaction with actual potential partners.
Mind you, this article is rather male-centric (it's partly a survey of studies, and partly a lament from the head of a Los Angeles PR agency, kvetching bitterly about all the unfeasibly gorgeous women he is surrounded by and how their presence is making his life a hell), and doesn't cover the female perspective; i.e., whether women are bombarded with images of unfeasibly attractive potential male partners, and whether this causes them to feel dissatisfied with actual partners (or potential partners) to the same extent.
(via Mind Hacks) ¶ [no comments]
2005/2/18
2003/12/10
Psychologists in Canada have proven that the mere sight of an attractive woman can induce men to act irrationally, impulsively. Candidates of both sexes were shown images of people's faces, ranked in terms of attractiveness (and taken from amihotornot.com), and then offered a choice between a small amount of money tomorrow or a larger one at some variable time in the future; men who saw images of highly attractive women were more inclined to go for the smaller reward available the next day (an irrational behaviour, much like those exhibited by drug addicts). Female candidates showed no difference in their behaviour when shown images of attractive or unattractive men.
2003/11/7
An article on the new generation of computer-generated über-babes, as seen in films, ads and Taschen coffee-table yuppie-erotica books, and soon to be taking jobs from yesteryear's meat-based supermodels.
Interestingly enough, the most impressive examples of computer-generated models are those with meticulously-computed imperfections (of the sort that get photoshopped out of photographs of live models). Though these are outnumbered by male geeks' idealised fantasy images of The Perfect Woman:
Obsessive behaviour often creates obsessive subject matter. Which is perhaps why a fair chunk of Weidemann's book could be written off as coffee-table porn. For every hyper-realistic exploration of a digital woman, such as Kaya, Digital Beauties features three with unrealistically large breasts. But filter out the provocative imagery of scantily clad women and you will discover some of the finest examples of computer graphics yet produced. Take Daniel Robichaud's hauntingly real digital resurrection of Marlene Dietrich. The Canadian animator chose the German chanteuse as the subject of his digital model and brought her back to life a decade after her death. The effect is simply breathtaking.
And then there's the story of Annlee, rescued from copyright slavery by two artists and now living it up in the creative commons:
As the critic Elizabeth Bard commented in the art magazine Contemporary, until the pair of French artists freed her from the Manga studio, Annlee was no more than an extra, "destined to live no more than a few pages in a comic book or frames of a film". Instead, Annlee has enjoyed a rather more illustrious career, showing at the Venice Biennalle, the New York Guggenheim, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London before culminating in a solo show called No Ghost Just a Shell at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art earlier this year.
2003/9/23
A Softer World is a 3-panel comic strip (for want of a better word) made with digital photographs and overlaid text, and can be beautiful, poetic, poignant and at times twisted and disturbing. A lot like life, really. (via DPH)
2003/5/28
The latest from the frontiers of science: in the future, gravestones and other such memorials may be replaced by trees containing the DNA of the deceased. Though whether people would want to eat apples containing their grandmothers' DNA is a cultural question yet to be answered. Meanwhile, science has found the perfect eyebrow shape, bringing humanity one step closer to a race of superhumanly beautiful cyborgs.
2003/5/23
An interesting online research project investigating what makes a face beautiful. It looks at various hypotheses (that the most mathematically average faces are the most beautiful, that beauty is symmetry, and that infantile features account for beauty in female faces) using computer-generated morphed faces, and comes to some interesting conclusions (i.e., that while extremely asymmetric faces are considered ugly, symmetry by itself does not correlate with beauty). Finally, it concludes that people subconsciously associate beauty with virtue, and that in this age of visual media, we are subject to a sort of "beauty pollution", being bombarded with images of artificially beautiful faces. (via bOING bOING)
2003/2/12
A Scottish artificial intelligence lab has developed
a robot with an eye for the ladies. The robot, nicknamed Doki, can identify male and female faces by appearance, and as a side effect, can calculate how physically attractive female faces are. (Mind you, this assumes that attractiveness is exclusively a factor of femininity of appearance, a somewhat simplistic model.) I wonder if (a) it would be fooled by transvestites, and (b) whether it gives a readout in Helens millihelens (the unit of beauty required to launch one ship).
2001/10/11
Scientists at University College London have discovered that making eye contact with an attractive face stimulates the brain's reward centre. Eye contact with an unattractive person triggers no such reward, and looking at a beautiful face without eye contact triggers a much diminished reward. The reward is not tied to the sex of the face. This goes some way towards explaining snap judgments made of people, and the evolutionary basis of evaluating social status and attractiveness.