Beauty
"True beauty excites the sights, ignites our soul and leaves us memorised"
What is beauty? What do the books say? The dictionaries? The philosophers?
Beauty can be inner or physical. As a society our attitudes towards beauty have always been changing. What we find attractive today may be history tomorrow. One thing is for certain, if we wait long enough, beauty transcends time. Neoclassical beauty has an element of immortality.
Physical Beauty is about shapes, form, balance, volume and proportions. It brings us visual harmony and pleasure to which we admire. It excites the sights. Beautiful objects evoke within us quite different kinds of feelings, sometimes awe, love or lust. Emotion is a response to a particular kind of beauty. Beauty stimulates an aesthetic feeling within us, pleasing to the eye, a sense of admiration. Beauty like a work of art is a matter of taste and opinion and varies according to different cultures.
Inner Beauty on the other hand describes a person's personality and charm. Inner beauty evokes a pleasing impression in the beholder. One must remember that the eye is not the only judge. The beauty of the mind is influenced by old memories, which sleep within us. These memories can shape our judgement about how we perceive something or someone in the same way that today's experiences will influence the future.
So, beauty can be a combination of physical and inner beauty. It is not only a question of the face, voice, body or a graceful physique. People can be beautiful because of their character, personality, and charm. Beauty and charm are often confused. Beauty of the personality can overshadow the beauty of the face and the opposite holds true. Beauty is often associated with charm. Charm differs from beauty in that it lasts for ever, whereas beauty fades. We see that it is not only the eye that judges whether someone or something is beautiful; it is above all the mind that determines the heart or inner beauty.
Artists from the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans era were mesmerised with beauty and attempted to define it with a number. Eventually the proportions were expressed as a mathematical formula that divided the perfect face into a ratio of 1:1.618. Nowadays, attitudes towards beauty have changed and this number plays a small factor in defining facial beauty. However, one of the factors preoccupying sculptors and artists was that beautiful faces and bodies seemed to be symmetrical.
