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What makes a person beautiful? Healthy skin, well-proportioned features? Those things certainly play a part. But there is much more to beauty than that. And it has far less to do with youth than we generally assume.
Hardly any face is perfectly symmetrical. Sometimes it's a childhood scar, a mole or a particular proportion that gets in the way of perfect symmetry. Thankfully.
What makes skin beautiful, what makes a face beautiful, what makes a person beautiful? As a dermatologist, I can answer at least some of these questions quite precisely. But that still doesn't explain why we find someone beautiful. Let's start with what we can answer.
From a dermatologist's point of view, beautiful skin is very well cared for, free from irritation, has a good blood supply, is relatively even in colour and structure, and has an age-appropriate surface texture. This applies to all skin tones, from the very palest to the very darkest. And the most important word in that description is "age-appropriate". Of course, a twenty-year-old's skin is usually smoother and more even than a sixty-year-old's. It is also true that young people are disproportionately likely to be considered beautiful. But why should we judge a sixty-year-old's skin by the standards of a twenty-year-old? We accept that our hearts, lungs and joints show signs of wear over the course of a lifetime. With our skin, we seem to find that much harder. And yet, skin with wrinkles can be wonderfully beautiful. There is beauty at every stage of life.
When we look at a face, we take in far more than wrinkles or smooth skin. In a 2006 study, researchers Bernhard Fink, Karl Grammer and Paul Matts digitally altered images of women's faces, changing only the distribution of skin colour. The shape of the faces and the texture of the skin remained the same. The result was remarkable: faces with a more even skin tone were perceived as younger, healthier and more attractive. This tells us something about our perception, not about the actual health of the people in the photographs. Still, the finding has practical significance, because the evenness of skin tone is something we can influence. Long-term exposure to UV radiation is a major contributor to uneven pigmentation. Consistent sun protection helps prevent these changes. But what constitutes beauty itself is a much bigger question.
Beauty belongs to the realm of aesthetics. The word comes from the Greek aísthēsis, meaning perception. We know the same root from medicine: anaesthesia means the loss of sensation. The philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who established aesthetics as a discipline in its own right in the 18th century, described beauty as the "perfection of sensory cognition". Beauty, then, does not lie solely in what we look at. How we perceive it matters too. That doesn't mean beauty is arbitrary or that it exists entirely in the eye of the beholder. But the way we look at things, our experiences and our ideas all help shape what we find beautiful. Human faces are a particularly good example.
Symmetry has long been considered an important feature of beauty. Yet if you construct a face from two perfectly mirrored halves, the result often looks strange, sometimes even unnatural. In reality, hardly any face is perfectly symmetrical. One eye may be slightly larger than the other, one corner of the mouth a little higher, the nose an unusual shape. Sometimes it's a childhood scar, a mole or a particular proportion that gets in the way of perfect symmetry. Thankfully. I can't remember ever seeing a boring face. Every face has its focal points, small details or more prominent features that give it its individuality. Often it is precisely these departures from the supposed norm that stay with us. Incidentally, the same is true when we look in the mirror. What we see as a flaw in ourselves may be the very thing that makes our face distinctive to someone else. And then there is the fact that a face never stands still. As soon as someone speaks, laughs, listens or thinks, their face changes. Posture, the way someone speaks, their manner and their confidence also shape our impression. Someone who seems unremarkable at first glance can reveal an extraordinary beauty in conversation or simply upon a second look. A person's beauty is therefore never solely a matter of outward appearance. Surface and substance cannot be separated.
Hardly any face is perfectly symmetrical. Sometimes it's a childhood scar, a mole or a particular proportion that gets in the way of perfect symmetry. Thankfully.
Our ideas of beauty are far less independent than we might think. The French philosopher Michel Foucault described how social norms exercise a form of disciplinary power: people adapt and adopt the views of those around them. When it comes to beauty, we look to images, ideals and what people in our peer group consider attractive. This can lead us to want to correct the very features that make us distinctive. As long ago as 1759, the English poet Edward Young asked: "Born Originals, how comes it to pass that we die Copies?" I firmly believe that, particularly when it comes to beauty, we need to follow our own path and have the confidence to decide for ourselves what we find beautiful.
Perhaps it helps to look for beauty beyond the human face. We can find it in music, in language and literature, in
the garden behind the house, between paving stones or on a moss-covered wall beside one of Hamburg's canals. Often
we encounter it in places where we least expect it.
Much of it conforms to no established ideal, and some of it only reveals itself on a second or third look. We
cannot always explain why something moves us. Beauty, after all, cannot be fully measured. Above all, we have to
be willing to see it in the first place.
You can read more about this in the chapter on beauty in my book How to Look Better.
