What makes something beautiful? There’s probably no answer to that question. Philosophers have wrestled with the task, as have evolutionary biologists, and all can only make vague suggestions at best. And yet, we know that some things are beautiful, and some are not, and people generally seem to agree.
The obvious response is perhaps that there is nothing essential that makes something beautiful; it’s all entirely subjective and different to every culture, and there is clearly a certain truth in this. On a basic level, different cultures throughout the ages have had very different ways of beautifying themselves, and different ideas of what is beautiful.
It’s inevitable, when considering what makes something beautiful, to turn to the modern idea of feminine beauty, beamed at us from every media outlet and advertising campaign, with the message that women should be thin and tanned. From a growing gym culture to Itsu’s repulsive “eat beautiful” slogan, the idea is ubiquitous in the modern world. But go back several hundred years and quite the opposite is the case. Go back several millennia and one finds in the Bible the line, “You had choice flour and honey and oil for food, you grew exceedingly beautiful.” No one ideal is more or less sexist, and interestingly, it seems that the most unattainable is always the most beautiful.
And of course, in human beauty there is another factor, one which the evolutionary biologist propounds — our ideals of beauty are built around what shows people to have money. If you’re tanned today it shows you’ve been on holiday (let’s ignore fake stuff), whereas several centuries ago it showed you had to work in the fields. Just like in the animal kingdom, we are attracted to those who can provide for us and our offspring. Just think of ‘lotus feet’, the binding of feet from a young age to make physical work impossible, showing a superior social status. To the modern eye, the results are horrific, but they must have become seen as a facet of beauty. In fact, it’s almost scary how our ideals of beauty appear to be simply fads, each giving way to the next as societies subtly change.
But this isn’t necessarily true, and modern research has thrown up some surprising findings — that maybe human beauty has a basic, objective level. Everyone’s heard of the golden ratio, the proportion that the human eye finds beautiful (it’s about 1:1.618, if you want to know). I daresay you’ve seen the spiral constructed from a series of ever growing ‘golden rectangles’. The ancients were well aware of this ratio as the proportions of beauty — it’s found in both the Parthenon and the Great Pyramid, and architects and artists have made use of it ever since.
It becomes fascinating, though, when we apply it to the human face. A ‘beautiful’ face can be divided up in hundreds of different ways, and a surprising number of these will show the golden ratio. For instance; you know how bottom lips are always fuller than top lips? Well, chances are the widths are in the proportions of the golden ratio. Faces can be divided up horizontally and vertically, both showing the golden ratio in action. All kinds of things, from the flare of the nose, to the centre of the lips, to the chin, often show a golden ratio.
It’s a slightly odd thought that our perceptions of beauty might simply be down to what is essentially a mathematical principle; that our brains are so unknowingly attuned to invisible numbers. But actually, this happens in another sphere of beauty, that of music.
What makes a chord, or any musical interval, for that matter, sound good? I’m fairly loathe to use the word again, but it’s got to be done: the ratio between the frequencies of the notes. We can leave the golden ratio behind; here what we’re after is any ‘perfect’ ratio, one that can be expressed in terms of whole numbers. The ancients knew this too, and Pythagoras is said to have been the first to discover it and understand music theory.
The legend goes that as he walked past a blacksmith’s he heard certain hammers ringing out together and producing a pleasing noise. Investigating further, he found the weights of these hammers to be in perfect ratios. That’s essentially bullshit (the note that hammers ring out isn’t directly proportional to their weight, for one thing). Instead, Pythagoras probably did use a ‘monochord’, an instrument with one string and a bridge in the middle. By moving that bridge, Pythagoras was able to divide the string visually into lengths of different ratios.
The result is that ratios of whole numbers make good sounds. Where the frequencies are in the ratio 1:2 we get an octave, 3:2 produces the interval of a perfect fifth (you can go on and list pretty much all vaguely nice-sounding musical intervals). But the point is this: our ears indisputably respond to mathematical perfection, so maybe we shouldn’t think it so odd that our eyes might too.
