what is objective to an extent in facial aesthetics then?

[alurmo]

this topic is a enigma, the users on this site unfortunetely havent touched passed the philosophy tests this site gave at entering, they just look at the face and instead of understanding its beauty and the whole olympus of what is seen as perfect and their interpretations, tehy just want to find methods to improve the appearance, this error of understanding what aesthetics truly is, is going to RUIN this sphere, instead of autysts who srs are interessted in teh topic, normfags oversimplify the topic to shits, and all u get in the lm section is ways to fix issues they got from other users and havent even looked at them themselves

so the question thus is, what guides and validates our judgements in this space, well the obvious answer would be a comparision of previous ocular sense evidence and whatnot but ofc theres always ways to go deeper

well we could say its instinctive or intuitive, which is a shallow answer, as the answer is just the fact that humans have instinctive reasons to prefer one face over the other, without a clear explanation

but then you get the objectivity of what is beauty, in all its characteristics and qualities, including all that is "ideal" in ratios and proportions, your bilateral symmetry, averageness, youthfulness and sexual dimorphism

along with this we also have to consider cultural influences and heredity factors, but with the development of social media this faculty of variability could be useless as we all have a chance to see the same face at the same time, without our own cultural reasoning and ideas in play too much
well a number of explanations through the course of history has already given us enough hypothesis on what is beautiful and what is ugly but nonetheless we can never get enough

• the oldest idea of the standardization of aesthetics can be traced to the idea of idealness in proportions and in teh modern sense, ratios, as well as symmetry, but its always normal to have mild assymetry tho
• Averageness is also a old topic, the typical 'aesthetic' face is not new, as its been studied by sir francis galton in the past, as well as the fact that the idea of a perfect face being made up of the mix of average faces being not new also comes up
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compo...eness and averageness one hundred years later.
• facial neoteny and dimorphism are more or less the same thing, signs of greath health and development, but neotemy may also be a reason for women to choose you as itt activates their nurturing faculty?(in question marks bc im unsure), but with that theres also alot of evidence that a combination of masc and neotenous features suffice in beauty

but then a question of where does all this come from arises, like mentioned previous possibly cultural but also could simply just be the idea of heredity, its been already experimented with infants who were shown beautiful and ugly faces, that they prefer beautiful faces, this could mean that facial beauty is a neccessaty for sexual selection

so again the question on the title of this thread comes up, is this really in the eye of the beholder?

well with the theory of culture preferences possibly, a perfect example for this is if u ask a pigeon what is beautiful it will describe the average features of a pigeon, ofc with minor differences but humans would find any other standards then our own species stupid, so why would it change for certain communities
in recent times this is not that important bc of there being more access to more faces and lesser inflluence by the community

this confusion of aesthetics drives me to depths i wouldnt be able to explain, it can very well be likely that theres no singular answer to why a face is attractive, imo beauty cannot be explained simply by using a single principle
around every corner of culture theres a mighty human bias towards their own cultural/environmental/genetic foundation, why should beauty be any different

@Sceptical @6ft4

 

[incelincel]

dnr

 

[alurmo]

dnr

the state of modern off-topic

 

[mohito]

Its all about the proportions relative to each other, also known as harmony

 

[acm]

dnr

good one

 

[valentine]

yves saint laurent