What Is Beauty

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What Is Beauty? What is beauty? Is it certain characteristics that stand out, like a certain hair colour or perfectly symmetrical features? The definition of beauty in the Cambridge dictionary is the quality of being pleasing, especially to look at, or someone or something that gives great pleasure, especially by being looked at. Kim Snyder says, the Dictionary left out a few words when it defined Beauty. It left out "what appeals to the heart". I agree with her because a blind man can find music beautiful and doesn’t see anything or hearing a child laugh can be truly beautiful. That made me think maybe you can’t define beauty because different people find different things beautiful. Take a painting for example one person may think it is exquisite, while another may find it hideous. After more thought I came to a conclusion that beauty must exist because people find different things beautiful. In 3rd century BC the Ancient Greeks first introduced the definition of beauty as something that produces pleasant sensations. In those days the keyword to beauty was proportion. Symmetry and harmony, being least likely to cause perceptive uneasiness, were recognized as inherently attractive to the human eye. (Martin Grey) Shakespeare expressed a similar sentiment in Love's Labour’s Lost in 1588: Good Lord Boyet, my beauty, though but mean, Needs not the painted flourish of your praise: Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye, Not uttered by base sale of chapmen's tongues This quote means everyone has their definition of beauty, what one person finds beautiful may be ugly to someone else. Margaret Wolfe Hungerford wrote the book Molly Bawn in 1878 and wrote the modern term "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." (Martin Grey) This saying means if you see past everything on the outside and not judge the book by the cover, you will see the true beauty on the inside and

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