Beauty perfected
BMJ 2001; 322 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/sbmj.0106204 (Published 01 June 2001) Cite this as: BMJ 2001;322:0106204
- Debashis Singh, fifth year medical student1
- 1University of Leicester
“From a man's face I read his character”
Petronius
“Physical beauty is the sign of an interior beauty, a spiritual and moral beauty”
Schiller
Medicine has always viewed beauty as a fairly trivial affair, subscribing to the notion that “beauty is only skin deep.” But we live in a society obsessed with physical appearance, where from every news stand and billboard beautiful faces stare out at us. So what must it be like to have a face which is not deemed culturally appropriate? For people who are blemished, scarred, or deformed beauty is not an insignificant matter but something that they have to wrestle with on a daily basis. One study into the effects of facial disfigurement on individuals found that an “unsightly scar or the conspicuous defect may well be as severe a social and economic handicap as complete physical incapacity.”1
DETAIL FROM THE THREE GRACES BY RUBENS, PRADO/BAL
What makes a person?
What is it that makes a person beautiful? Is it, as Plato would have us believe, a precise interlocking of parts to create an ideal form, or is it, as current scientific thinking suggests, related to facial symmetry.2–7 Whatever the definition, the fact remains that on a daily basis we make assumptions about and modify our behaviour towards people based purely on their physical appearance.
People who are deemed unattractive seem to have all …
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