If this is beauty...
Oct. 9th, 2008 12:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityvixenI'll happily stay ugly.
Yes, symmetry is important, but our appreciation of beauty is as much about the differences and oddities and the stark contrasts as it is about perfection. I don't think a single one of the slideshow photos makes the person in it look more beautiful. More cookie-cutter "pretty" perhaps. (The woman at the start of the article is positively a different person with the manipulation and not more beautiful for it.)
I'm also weirded out that James Franco looks almost the same in his "after" as he does in his "before." I've honestly never thought about him in any context of "beauty." Mostly because his defining feature for me was determined when my former roommate called him "Johnny McSquinty" after we saw Spider-Man. I suppose he is very classically beautiful. I don't think he's striking (not like Paul Newman, say, who is another called "classically" beautiful). Perhaps that solidifies my thesis that beauty is deviance from the golden mean of perfect symmetry. James Franco has never provoked me to heights of ecstatic slut-itude. Not like this guy, or this guy, or this guy. (Or even this guy, and I only just started watching his show!) It's sort of the same as my reaction to Denzel Washington. I read in People magazine ages ago, that he had the closest to a perfectly symmetrical face of just about any star in Hollywood. I agree. Denzel Washington is gorgeous. But he doesn't do it for me.
Yes, symmetry is important, but our appreciation of beauty is as much about the differences and oddities and the stark contrasts as it is about perfection. I don't think a single one of the slideshow photos makes the person in it look more beautiful. More cookie-cutter "pretty" perhaps. (The woman at the start of the article is positively a different person with the manipulation and not more beautiful for it.)
I'm also weirded out that James Franco looks almost the same in his "after" as he does in his "before." I've honestly never thought about him in any context of "beauty." Mostly because his defining feature for me was determined when my former roommate called him "Johnny McSquinty" after we saw Spider-Man. I suppose he is very classically beautiful. I don't think he's striking (not like Paul Newman, say, who is another called "classically" beautiful). Perhaps that solidifies my thesis that beauty is deviance from the golden mean of perfect symmetry. James Franco has never provoked me to heights of ecstatic slut-itude. Not like this guy, or this guy, or this guy. (Or even this guy, and I only just started watching his show!) It's sort of the same as my reaction to Denzel Washington. I read in People magazine ages ago, that he had the closest to a perfectly symmetrical face of just about any star in Hollywood. I agree. Denzel Washington is gorgeous. But he doesn't do it for me.
