SCIENTIFIC METHOD IDEAL BEAUTY.- by Mercedes Díaz-M. Pérez. Related science topic- Psycology

QUESTION Is there a global standard for beauty? This experiment is done to make the people (specially teenage girls, who are the most affected by social ideas of beauty) see that there is beauty in everybody and that if you consider someone beautiful or attractive or not is due to the ideas of beauty that your society and culture has taught you. The idea came to me during this summer. I have been around very superficial people who only cared about their own and others self appearance and when I saw this paper pasted on the mirror of a high school bathroom the idea of demonstrating through a scientific experiment that EVERYONE is beautiful if seen from the right eyes came to me.

BACKGROUND RESEARCH During history the ideas of beauty and the social laws for personal appearance have been changing a lot, specially for woman. For example during the renaissance the ideal for beauty was a pale, blond, not very skinny woman(1), even longer ago the attractiveness for a woman was only related to her health and her fertility(2) (wide hips, great body mass, large breasts...). For men ideal natural beauty haven’t changed much since the ancient Greece; a strong and muscled warrior to defend his people from the danger (3). What has hanged a lot for men are their social laws for self appearance, for example, wearing dresses skirts or make up was normal for men a couple of centuries ago (4) while now a days that would be terribly embarrassing. And throughout all this history humans have been looking for the ideal equation or image of beauty. The thing is that when someone loves you they don’t care about your hair color, your height, your skin,your weight or how you look or what you wear. We tend to think that there is a total ideal for beauty when there isn’t. All you feel when you feel attracted to someone without knowing them personally is merely superficial and the set of criteria you are using is the one that your culture has given you through this “socially constructed ideas of beauty” that are all different through out the world

HYPOTHESIS Based on my observation and my research the hypothesis I came is the following: Whether you consider someone beautiful or not depends on two factors: The first one the standards of beauty that the society you live in has created. Your personal experience and, if you know that person, if you like them personally or not.

HYPOTHETICAL EXPERIMENT The experiment would have two phases, to control each one of the factors that, as the hypothesis states, control the perception of beauty. The first one would consist in taking a full body picture of 50 different people of different physical and cultural characteristics (different races, ages,body types, hair...) and sending them to 5 photographers in 25 different countries from every continent in the whole world. (USA, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Italy, France, Germany, Moldavia, Greece, Finland, Morocco, Egypt, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Democratic Republic of Congo, Turkey, Ukraine, Russia, Saudi Arabia, China, Japan, Singapore, “North Korea” (ideally), Thailand and Australia). The pictures would be sent just with one statement: - “Make them beautiful”. We would end up with 6,250 different pictures. After the photograph edition we would fill up the following table that notices the changes: (TABLE) Then the second phase consists in selecting the five pictures of the five woman that share the most common changes in each continent(we would end up with 35 different pictures) and showing then to 50 different common people in different places in the world and make them and make them pick one for the most sexually attractive and another one for the cutest (the one they would be most likely to date). changescharacterisics to take into account in those changes Hair lenght, color Face eyes (shape and colour), eye lashes (lenght),front (size),nose (shape), lips (size and color) skin Tone breast Size hip Size, height body size Size (...XXS,XS,S,M etc) legs lenght, thickness make up strenght clothes style torso muscoulous

HYPOTHETICAL RESULTS What the results would be if the experiment would prove the hypothesis right should be the following: The picture that was chose as the most sexually attractive person should be mostly the same for every person living in the same culture (Occidental, African, South American, Asian or Arabic) but the picture for the person you think you would like the most should be different for everyone as ideally they should have chosen it from personal experiences (they should have picked the people that resemble the people they love or are close with)

CONCLUSIONS Society and culture teaches us how beauty should be and sometimes we assume them and fix these standards of beauty that our society has created so much into our midns that we forget that everyone is beautiful and attractive even if they don’t fit in those standards. They just need to fit into our personal standars that are set through personal experience. Conclusion- Everyone is beautiful just for being human.

Sources: beauty htm