There is a statement which is very true which goes ‘Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder’ and there are many situations where this can be proved. I would start off by reminding ourselves how many times we have commented to a friend on how good looking a certain person is only to find that the friend doesn’t agree with you at all. Your friend does not have the same taste that you have and sees beauty in a different way to you. For example some women think that hairy men are virile and attractive while others might even think that they looked quite repulsive. Some men think thin and slender women are attractive whilst other men say they like a woman with a bit of flesh on her! Well I could go on and on with the varying examples of what beauty should mean. Beauty is even seen differently throughout the different ages, for example when we look at the era of the painter Titian and see all his plump naked women with their flowing red hair we can obviously see that in those days a woman had to be, to put it bluntly, ‘fat’ to be attractive. Then between the 70’s and up until now it changed to the opposite due to the influence of Twiggy and other such models which also started off the trend for so many diet fads and gymnasiums. I say ‘up until now’ because the example of beauty is yet again changing back again to the fuller figure due to artists like Beyonce, Jennifer Lopez, Salma Hayett, Scarlet Johanssen, and Monica Belucci, who are influencing us again to believe that beauty is a woman with curves. Many years ago, when I was much younger back in the 60’s, they used to emit a programme on television once a week called ‘The Twilight Zone’ which were quite short stories but I was very hooked on them because the themes were so unusual yet always giving you something to think about as they all sent out a moral to the story as it were. One particular episode began with this woman lying in a hospital bed with her face completely bandaged up while doctors and nurses hovered around her and although you never get to see their faces you soon realise that they are a unit of plastic surgeons . They were talking about how difficult the operation had been but that her case had definitely been one of the most difficult ones that they had come up against. You sense that the time has come to take off her bandages and see how successful they had been in curing her deformed face. You or I, the audience start to imagine the worst and with every inch of bandage that starts to be peeled off we get more and more apprehensive. What will she look like? How could she look so bad? Was she born ugly or did she have an accident? when suddenly the camera zooms into her face and you see this lovely looking woman with the most perfect features. You then hear the doctors and nurses exclaim in horror how the operation had been a total failure, that they haven’t managed to do anything for this poor ugly creature and you stay completely perplexed …until the camera at last switches to the faces of the nurses and doctors who are all hideous creatures resembling half ape and half something else! So the moral of this story was that obviously Beauty is indeed in the eyes of the beholder.
