Beauty in all shapes and sizes

What is beauty and how does one define beauty?
Pretty much everybody has heard the sentence “beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder“ at least once in their lifetime. But is it really true? Or are we blinded by the norms of society and are we programmed to believe what is beautiful and what is not?

The earth‘s eight billion humans share many similarities and differences. Everyone one earth must eat, breathe, and drink to stay alive. Everyone has a family, a language, and a culture. All people have hopes, dreams, fears, and feelings. And humans differ in many ways, too. Some of these differences are physical, such as skin color or gender. Other differences, such as language, customs, and beliefs, are learned. In the same way we have learned to believe what is and what is not beautiful. After all beauty is something that can be changed through undergoing surgeries or with the help of makeup https://www.intothebreeze.com/ or other beauty products.

Nevertheless similarities and differences are the basis for social groups. Age, gender, race, culture, and religion are some social groups – and everyone is a member of some social groups. Regardless if they want to be or not. And thus they learn what beauty means in their social group or what the understanding of beauty in their social group is.

Therefore social groups have long been a part of human history. Classifying people intp ‘us‘ and ‘them‘ helped humans develop tribes, clans, and other social structures leading to conflicts and fighting. Mostly because people from different tribes, clans or groups were considered to be different based on their looks.

‘Us‘ and ‘them‘ thinking still continues. People tend to be with people whoe are similar to them and who look similar to them while avoiding people who are different. This means that thes do not learn about them. Consequently, it is easy to make guesses and judgemenst about others based on very liited knowledge. These pre-judgements are called prejudices.

Prejudices are driven by stereotypes. Stereotyps are an exaggerated or distorted belief or image about a person or group; consequently people falsely believe that ‘they‘ are all similar which leaves no room for individual differences.

No-one is born believing stereotypes – they are learned from the media, parents or friends. Therefore people learn from their surroundings what they should or should not consider beautiful. Children begin to learn prejudices and stereotypes as early as two or three years old. You can tell that just by simply observing kids. For example, a group of girls may tell a boy that he cannot play house because it is a girl‘s game. As these attitudes intensify over a persons‘s lifetime, they are difficult to change. Like mentioned before, beauty is something that is being taught to children and thus does is really lie in the eyes of the beholder? After all beauty or beautiful people come in all shape and sizes https://abramelin.org.uk/ different hair colors, different eye colors and different skin colors.
And the variety is exactly what makes people beautiful.