How can we define what is beautiful? What is beautiful to us is purely subjective, but beauty, universally, is a perceptual experience that instils a sense of pleasure, meaning, satisfaction and perhaps emotion in the subject. Beauty can have aesthetic properties, thus bringing us in harmony with our senses and with nature, or even conceptual properties. For example, the concept of a new innovative technology may be beautiful to a businessman, whilst the aesthetic, figurative/symbolic and religious implications in Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper" may be beautiful to a painter.
However, human beauty encompasses a different facet of beauty, which is characterised by a person's personality, intelligence, grace, congeniality, charm, integrity, congruity and elegance. These include both the so called "outer beauty" and "inner beauty" (which is not physically observable). Unfortunately, as a cultural creation, beauty has been heavily commercialised. It has become a standard of comparison in society. People feel resentment, anger and dissatisfaction when they do not achieve "beauty". They do not contain the physical characteristics that categorise them as "beautiful". This has had a negative impact on us as it enhances materialism and superficiality in society.
People must embrace not what they are told is beautiful, but what their mind and senses tell them.
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