Beauty Doesn't Exist - What Makes Something Beautiful? FutureIQ

18,114 views Wait, is this logic right? • May 17, 2024

Slog Reference: Understanding Beauty

Description

Why you find some people beautiful? Understanding how beauty works or is measured can give you a better idea on what makes some people beautiful. Can beauty be objectified in this way is another question? Let's see how we came to our beauty standards and why you find some girls attractive in this episode of FutureIQ.

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More videos for you:
Do looks matter? https://youtu.be/xQfypw2nkeA
Are cute girls dumb? https://youtu.be/r4Tl1GUeVGs

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:19 Measuring beauty
03:45 Average is not common
04:48 Why it works?
06:15 Western standards of beauty
07:50 Is beauty cultural?
11:36 Beauty and symmetry
14:00 Beauty is average

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Understanding Beauty

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Transcript

- did you know that beautiful people are average which means they have average eyes average lips average forehead average everything average I thought the point of beauty was to stand out how can average stand out I can prove it using maths and science okay but first I have to start with a story okay so this a story from 150 years ago Sir Francis Galton a great scientist and also a RAC okay so this is the guy who invented the concept of correlation okay huh but also the guy who invented the word Eugenics so okay he felt that we should be able to look at people's faces and tell whether this person is a criminal or this person is a

0m 49s vegetarian okay that those are two very different things to infer from but honestly a lot of people do that even nowadays yeah so he wanted to find out statistically and mathematically what features in somebody's face will indicate criminality or vegetarianism all right and he did what a statistician would do he took a bunch of faces of criminals and then he averaged them okay okay so actually averaged the size of the nose average the size of the eyes average the size of the forehead and everything just you know find a mathematically average face of all the criminals similarly find a mathematically average face of all the vegetarians right and then he was hoping that that average face when you look at

1m 44s the average criminal face you would be able to say oh yeah see look if there is nose like this and lips like this that's a criminal and if there is a forehead like this that's a vegetarian okay so he basically hoped that certain features of criminal would stand out certain features of vegetarians would stand out yes exactly okay that didn't work out okay obviously we know that you can't look at a person and tell they're a vegetarian right yeah but something completely unexpected happened okay okay he just noticed that the average faces that he had average criminal and average vegetarian both those average faces were more attractive than normal okay and suddenly he wondered whether averaging

2m 34s faces makes them look more beautiful more attractive okay he wrote a paper on that okay then some years later stard repeated the experiment except that instead of criminals and vegetarians he used scientists and the average scientist face was also more attractive than average he used students and he found that the average student face was also more attractive than in 1990 computers were used to generate mathematically average faces and came to the same conclusion yeah we we've seen a lot of those average faces of different ethnicities roing around in a chart but you know this doesn't pass the smell test because I have two objections one is that average basically means half the people are uh half the people fall into that

3m 32s category are you saying that half the people are actually attractive the second is when we say attractive there is some feature that stands out average a feature standing out are in congruent so let me explain okay three points okay first is that actually average is quite uncommon okay okay let me take a simple example imagine in a class everybody got marks and average marks are 42 okay okay how many students do you think will have 42 marks uh it is possible zero oh yeah plus or minus say five of that there will be lots of students but the number who have exactly average will be very low right yeah because the way normal distributions are spread out is that

4m 24s most people are around the average but very few will be exactly that is first point got it got it second is that there are lots of features on the face right so you have to be average exactly average on each one of them right if you're a little off on a few of them suddenly you are not average right so for all your features to be exactly average is extremely rare right that's why deika padukon is rare okay Priyanka chra but sure but yes you are right we don't want every to be average that is not attractive right right there are certain features in a body that are directly related to survival right like tall and muscular in men like wide

5m 10s birthing hips in women right now for those features you want them to be above average right but there's a whole lot of features which are not directly related to survival right like the size of your eyes the width of your lips the size of your forehead not directly related true there actually it being above average or far away from average can be a sign of something wrong right so for the indirect features indirect as in indirect for survival yeah so for the features that are indirectly related to survival average is good because anything far from average is a sign of something being potentially bad corre and the number of features just from far when you are looking the number of

5m 59s featur features which are directly related to survival is pretty small most features correct are indirectly related and that's why average makes for a beautiful face that kind of clears the doubts that I had uh but here's the thing both of these scientists that you mentioned are not Indian so I'm guessing that a lot of studies were done either in the US or in Europe somewhere right so a lot of these standards of attractiveness and beauty must probably correlate to American or European standards so that's a very valid point uh if you look at any psychology research there is a very very high chance that all the subject were white men and women who were college

6m 45s students right because that is the easiest to do so you always have to be careful of this but in this particular case not true oh this experiment this kind of experiments have been repeated all over the world and it has always given the same result in fact interesting they went all the way back to the African Savana that we like to talk about we go to the African saana at least once in every episode oh yes what they did was they went to Tanzania and they found a tribe of hunter gatherers the hadza they collected lots of faces of hadza averaged them and showed the average hadza face to the hza people correct and they found that face to be

7m 28s more attractive than the others oh interesting I will tell you something much more interesting right they showed an average European face to the hza people and they did not find that more attractive aha okay yeah it kind of in a weird way it kind of makes sense so are you saying that the concept of attractiveness the concept of beauty is it learned is it cultural is it what what is it is it so it's a strange mix of biological and cultural okay let me explain okay babies H are hardwired to like attractive faces babies babies they have done research and they have found that babies spent more time looking at attractive faces than looking at non-attractive faces

8m 20s this is tiny babies even before they have had a chance to see television and learn what is supposed to be beautiful okay not just that babies also spend more time looking at average faces okay okay even when the average is just handdrawn averages as in you draw a number of cartoon faces then you take an average of all the noses all the eyes average of the cartoon Drawn Faces and when you show an average cartoon face babies spend more time looking at that comp compared to the other cartoon faces okay so average is also hardwired okay but here is the third interesting thing okay this concept of average attractiveness doesn't exist in newborn babies okay

9m 14s okay as soon as a baby is born this is not there one day later huh it is there one day one day in in one day they figure out what average is and what attract iess is so there is a little bit of research showing that with around 30 faces that happens and a little bit of research showing that even with 5 to 10 faces this can happen this is very interesting in so many ways because the first 30 faces that a baby is likely to see are most likely to be family and you know close family which already share a resemblance in faces anyway so uh eventually when you grow up your idea of

9m 55s attractiveness which was formed on day one of your life is based on what your family looks like which means is that why people usually end up marrying people who look like their mothers and fathers so much to explore here somebody please do a new study this is me just rambling but wow uh let's not get carried away okay because this research just shows some simple General Trends right there are lots of little complexities and lots of ways in which things change but basically you're right I think that pretty much explains why the hza people find average hza faces attractive but not average European faces attractive one more thing I want to say when I grew

10m 40s up we didn't have TV at home and most of our theaters show Hindi movies right so I grew up not liking blonde faces right blonde people they just looked ugly is to me right of course then you know spending 10 15 years uh watching Hollywood and spending time in the US and that has shifted somewhat but it works that way I think Gentlemen Prefer Blondes I get it I get it uh it would be actually an interesting uh uh idea to take a sample of uh the 5 10 people around you and then sort of average them out and then you know sort of grade them on what kind of attractiveness uh you think they are it would be very

11m 25s fascinating to do that experiment in this office right yeah we should we should actually try that we'll try that in the office I don't know if we'll be able to share the results with you but if we do try it we'll let you know I'm also I'm also thinking that uh an average looking face is basically a face that cancels out all the extremes because that's what average does right you cancel out the extreme and fall somewhere in the middle so none of the extremes that would uh either strike out or you know feel awkward are visible in an average looking space which is which basically means that the average face is somewhat symmetrical actually you're

12m 02s right okay there is research showing that we prefer symmetric faces over asymmetric faces okay and the explanation for that is also fairly simple the ability of your genes to keep everything symmetrical in face of environmental damage environmental ups and downs right that shows that you have good quality genes if your genes can't hand that much that means that you know you're not a fit person I was hoping but anyway all I can do is hope interesting very interesting this idea that averageness symmetry gives an indication of your Fitness for survival shows up in other places also okay for example the hourglass figure which is attractive uh in women actually comes from having higher levels of certain female hormones okay

13m 00s and those hormones are also correlated with higher fertility o interesting but this is not always true In some cultures right uh tribes where women are supposed to work in the fields right there having a very small waste would actually be a disadvantage and those cultures do not find the hourglass figure attractive they prefer higher waste to hip ratios right because if you're working in the the fields then you need to have strength in your hips your thighs and that basically does that basically means no hourglass figure yeah and this is not happening at like a logic level okay this is happening deep in your brain at an instinctual level it's just hard wired into us also makes

13m 46s sense because those are the kind of people you see on a daily basis so your idea of beauty is also or attractiveness is also framed by you averaging the people you see on a regular basis yeah so yeah kind of makes sense and and it's a very interesting thought because all along we've been conditioned to believe that beauty is something different something unique that you see whereas the fact of the matter has always been the opposite all along beauty is just average exactly beauty is average and beauty is related to Fitness right also it proves that beauty is not skin deep but anyway the there is no major life lesson in this episode there is nothing

14m 32s no self-improvement you're getting out of this no no hold on the life lesson here is beauty is in the eyes of the beholder because your eyes determine what your average is but if you do want life lessons check out the other episode we have done on beauty which points out that beautiful people are more successful and it also gives you tips on what you can do even if you're not beautiful so all you beautiful people go check Che that episode out Shri Kant naen future IQ