Beauty is often associated with pleasure. In the British Isles, it was a different story. Locke distinguished between ‘primary’ and’secondary’ qualities of beauty, and regarded color as a phantasm of the mind, rather than an actual source of beauty. Today, aesthetics is largely about the form of an object, such as a face or a body. In addition, it is difficult to say what makes a person or object a “beautiful” object.
Plato’s concept of beauty was different from that of Aristotle. He saw beauty as a relationship between whole and parts, and a harmonious whole. His view was that beauty is a subjective experience and has no higher status than entertainment, and therefore cannot be compared to justice and truth. However, he did not deny that a person’s perception of beauty may vary from another person’s. In his later works, he used the notion of beauty to justify his own ideas, arguing that it is the object’s properties that make it beautiful.
While this might sound strange to many, it has long been the case that a woman’s beauty has evolved over time. As the standards of beauty have become more individualized, it has become a means of power. Beauty has become an object of desire, and the purchase of beauty products has become an avenue to regain power over one’s own self-image. This is how the beauty industry has exploited the insecurities of the consumer base.
In the twentieth century, artists began to abandon the ideal of beauty as the dominant goal of their art. The politicization of beauty prompted artists to move away from aesthetically pleasing works to more important and urgent projects. Moreover, beauty became associated with political and economic oppression, as a result of its associations with these things. Indeed, Arthur Danto’s book The Abuse of Beauty revealed how the politics and economics of beauty have distorted the concept of beauty.
Beauty was once a matter of status in the Orient. Women in the 17th century, for example, cultivated the ideal of beauty by copying the facial beauty of Queen Elizabeth I. They used thick layers of makeup and cosmetics to make their faces look beautiful and elegant. They even hid their faces behind masks, made from black velvet or stiffened leather. In the early twentieth century, a famous socialite named Maria Gunning was poisoned with lead found in a Venetian ceruse.
Despite the widespread use of the word “beautiful” in the United States, the definition of beauty is quite different in Pakistan. It can refer to the soul, a beautiful smile, or a drop-dead angel. The term is difficult to pin down due to the diverse population of the U.S. and its remnants of colonialism. Nevertheless, the notion of beauty in Pakistan reflects the cultural and aesthetic values of the people who inhabit it.