What is beauty? We are born into a heavily polarised world. Everything around us contributes to a distributed, decentralised but universally accepted truth: Beauty changes. Beauty fades. Beauty even evolves.
Beauty can be sensed. With our ears, we listen to birds, our mother’s voice, and an opera. With our noses, we smell cake, perfume, and the natural body odour of the person we love. Our eyes wonder at every sunrise or sunset. Beauty is everywhere around us. While not a sense per se, we wonder about beautiful ideas inside our minds. We twist and turn them on all their sides, hoping to uncover another beautiful facet of the same idea. This is why we call it „the mind’s eye”.
It is generally accepted that beauty is a feature [1]. We call things beautiful or ugly (the opposite of beautiful), depending on how they make us feel. Actually, beauty itself does not exist, it’s just a construct of our brains, that tries to make sense of the world around us. In other words, everything we perceive is just an interpretation. And within this interpretation, a huge amount of factors weigh in, transforming the idea of beauty into a strangely personal and universal thing.
But, arguably, the main thing that powers our inner perception of beauty is subjectivity. It is how we look at the world, through the little black dots below our foreheads that we call…
