Calculating Beauty

What makes a person good looking? The million dollar question. My twelve year old brother recently did had a math project in which he was asked to record the measurements of his face. The first step was to measure the length of his lips, find the halfway point, and record the length of each side to test for symmetry. He then repeated the measurement using the outside of his right eye to the outside of his left. Then he measured the inside of his eye to the inside of the other and followed by measuring the outside of one nostril to the other. He concluded the experiment by measuring the distance between cheekbones. The point of the experiment was to see how symmetrical and properly proportioned his face was. At the end of the assignment, the math teacher said that the more symmetrical your face, the more you are perceived as 'good looking'. Symmetry does exist, but is being beautiful the same as properly aligned?

In Naomi Wolf's Beauty Myth, beauty and perception go much deeper than the measurement from a nose to a cheekbone. Wolf says that, "The quality called 'beauty' objectively and universally exists" (12). Beauty is part reality, but the other part of it is in the eye of the beholder. However, over time, beauty has transformed from a quality into a lifestyle. Women strive to embody it, while men strive to obtain women who possess it. Beauty has always been an admirable quality, why wouldn't it be?

Wolf perfectly outlines the core of her book and the beauty myth itself when she remarks, "In assigning value to women in a vertical hierarchy  according to a culturally imposed physical standard, it is an expression of power relations in which women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves" (12). This excerpt is extremely important, as it sets the scene for the rise of the beauty myth. However, I am also interested in the role of women in the formation and progression of the beauty myth. I think the old saying, "it takes two" applies to social standards. Men may be the ones who provoke and encourage women to exude beauty, but women are equally guilty of absorbing the stereotype and turning it, along with the help of men, into a worldwide phenomenon that finds its roots embedded deep within our culture.