Pioneering the Geographies of Beauty: A Recap...

Thanks for everyone who participated in our presentation last Tuesday. We hope we provided some further food for thought on how Geography can be applied to unconventional subjects, such as Beauty. Here is a recap of the main arguments proposed in our presentation...

• Cultural variations of what defines 'beauty' do exist. We gave examples of pale skin in the Far East and tanned skin in Western Europe to represent wealth in both cases. Also, how over time our preferences are changing in relation to mass media influences, such as curvy female figures of the 1950s (Marilyn Monroe) and size 0 models of today.



• We also argued that despite these cultural influences on what defines 'beauty', there are underlying features that all persons perceive as attractive, eg. symmetrical facial features, wide eyes, full lips, overall youthful appearance



• Traditional English views of beauty as pale and 'white' justified slavery; 'Black' was seen as 'ugly' and inferior. This arguably continues today as we showed in our examples of Latin American and North American Beauty Pageants.



• Fairytales continue the 'Feminine Beauty Ideal' today and porpagate the idea that beauty, especially feminine beauty, equals success (feminist perspective).



• The Beauty Salon can be seen as a liberating space; making beauty available to all. It can also be viewed as a theraputic landscape. However, it can also be viewed as exploitative of people's insecurities about their appearance.



• The international success of Ugly Betty contests the notion of the 'Beauty Myth' (Wolf).



• Virtual Beauties, eg. airbrushing in popular media are creating an ideal of beauty that is unattainable to the vast majority of the population.

We hope that we've reminded you of the different worlds produced by beauty. We appreciated all the questions and comments put forward after our presentation, they were insightful and really helped us evaluate our presentation. We noticed, however, that one main point was drawn from our presentation, that of beauty as liberating, but we hope that this blog will remind you that that was not the main message; we wanted to show you all the different worlds of beauty, including those which exclude not only liberate.

Referring to the table at the top of the page, these are the results from the activity in which we asked you to rate the nine photos.

General findings showed that people tended to rate the pictures in similar categories to one another. Therefore, enforcing the idea that people share similar ideas on how they perceive beauty.

Hope you enjoyed it! Good Luck in the exam everyone!

Helen, Vicky and Angela.

References:

Baker-Sperry , L. and Grauerholz, L. (2003) The Pervasiveness and Persistence of the Feminine Beauty Ideal in Children’s Fairytales, Gender and Society, vol.15 (5), pp: 711-726

Biddle, J. & Hamermesh, D. S. (1993) ‘Beauty and the Labour Market’. NBER working paper No. w4518

Black, P. & Sharma, U. (2001) ‘Men are Real, Women are Made up: Beauty Therapy and the construction of Femininity’. Sociological Review. Issue 1 Vol. 49 pp100-116.

Black, P. (2004) ‘The Beauty Industry: Gender, Culture, Pleasure’. Routledge: London.

Featherstone, M. (2003) ‘Body Modification’. Sage: London.

Jordan, W. (1968) White Over Black: American attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812, University of North Carolina Press; Chapel Hill.

Ossman, S. (2002) ‘Three Faces of Beauty: Casablanca, Paris, Cairo’. Duke University Press: London.

Simpson, T. (2007) ‘The Hidden Beauty of Ugly Betty’. Daily Mail [on-line] accessed 11.01.07 available from; http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=427992&in_page_id=1879

Sarwer, D. B., Grossbart, T. A., Didie, E. R. (2003) Beauty and Society, Seminars in Cutaneous Medicine and Surgery, Vol. 22(2) pp: 79-92

Wolf, N.. (1991). The beauty myth. Doubleday: New York