Consumers of different genders often have different consumption habits, especially pertaining to routine, daily practices. Anecdotal evidence, as well as scholarly research, suggests that feminists ...may experience conflicting pressures surrounding consumption associated with a feminine identity—such as applying make‐up, shaving one's legs, keeping fingernails manicured, and styling one's hair. We investigate how consumption experiences surrounding beauty work differ for feminists and nonfeminists. Employing a variety of methods—including online experiments (Studies 1 and 4), secondary data (Study 2), and a behavioral study (Study 3)—we demonstrate that feminists report higher preferences for premium beauty products than nonfeminists. Feminists’ preferences stem from associating beauty work with feelings of empowerment or, more specifically, self‐determination. We discuss implications for our work and conclude with a call for additional research examining how consumers experience consumption dictated by social standards and expectations rather than individual choice.
Taking the concept of beauty seriously, this encyclopedia examines how humanity has sought and continues to seek what is ‘beautiful’ in a variety of cultural contexts, giving readers an understanding ...of how to look at beauty both intellectually and critically. Is beauty ever more than “skin deep”? Arguably yes, considering that the concept of beauty—and the pursuit of it—has shaped cultures worldwide, across every time period, and has even served to change the course of history. Studying beauty practices yields insight into social status, wealth, political ideology, religious doctrine, and gender expectations, including gender nonconformity. A truly interdisciplinary text, Beauty around the World: A Cultural Encyclopedia presents an insightful perspective on beauty that draws from philosophy, literature, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and feminist studies, giving readers a unique view of world beauty practices. This volume offers information about beauty practices from the past to the present in alphabetical entries that address terms and topics such as “beards,” “dreadlocks,” “Geisha,” “moko tattoos,” and “progressive muscularity.” Readers will better comprehend how beauty shapes many social interactions in profound ways worldwide, and that the unspoken social agreements that shape ideals of attractiveness and desirability within any given culture can matter very much. The encyclopedia’s entries challenge readers to consider the questions “What is beauty?” and “Why does it matter?” A comprehensive bibliography is a valuable resource for further research. Features • Provides an interdisciplinary approach to world beauty practices, from the earliest experiments in plastic surgery in 600 B.C. to contemporary practices • Gives readers a representative overview of beauty practices around the globe • Documents how from cosmetics to clothing, exercise to body modification, being beautiful is a goal worldwide • Identifies numerous authoritative sources of information for further research and reading
Between the Harlem Renaissance and the end of World War II, a discourse that privileged a representative ideal of brown beauty womanhood emerged as one expression of race, class, and women's status ...in the modern nation. This discourse on brown beauty accrued great cultural currency across the interwar years as it appeared in diverse and multiple forms. Studying artwork and photography; commercial and consumer-oriented advertising; and literature, poetry, and sociological works, this text analyzes African American print culture with a central interest in women's social history. It explores the diffuse ways that brownness impinged on socially mobile New Negro women in the urban environment during the interwar years and shows how the discourse was constructed as a self-regulating guide directed at an aspiring middle class.
Nowadays social network influencers play an important role in marketing by introducing products to their audience. In this article, we investigate the persuasion cues related to beauty and fashion ...influencers present on YouTube and Instagram. More precisely, we investigate how the para-social interaction (PSI) the audience creates with the online influencer, along with their perceived credibility, are related to the purchase intention and how they are, in turn, related to the social and physical attractiveness and attitude homophily. We base our research on four beauty influencers popular in France and control our results by the age of the participants and by the influencer. We find that attitude homophily is positively related to PSI but, surprisingly, the physical attractiveness shows negative relationship or no evidence of relationship. Both credibility of the influencers and PSI exhibit significant and positive relationships to purchase intention.
•We study how the credibility of the blogger and para-social interaction (PSI) are related and influence the purchase intention.•We collect a survey-based dataset related to four beauty and fashion bloggers in France: EnjoyPhoenix, DazzlingDrew, Sananas2016 and Georgia Secret (Horackova).•A partial least squares (PLS) approach was used to test the model. Multi-group analysis by age and by influencer were performed.•Attitude homophily is strongly related to both credibility and para-social interaction, which are positively related to the purchase intention.•No evidence that social or physical attractiveness is related to para-social interaction, particularly for the young population.
Philosophers of aesthetics universally agree that visual and auditory stimuli may be considered beautiful. Divergently, controversy greets the question "Can olfactory or gustatory experiences be ...conceptualized as beautiful?" In Study 1 participants inhaled Joy® perfume applied to a cotton pad for 30 s and immediately completed the AESTHEMOS (Schindler et al., 2017), a scale measuring aesthetic emotions. Results indicated stronger prototypical (feeling of beauty and liking, fascination, being moved, and awe), pleasing (joy, humor, vitality, energy, and relaxation), and epistemic (surprise, interest, intellectual challenge, and insight) aesthetic emotions, and fewer negative aesthetic emotions (feeling of ugliness, boredom, confusion, anger, uneasiness, and sadness), were elicited by the perfume compared with a no-scent control condition. Results showed 36% of participants found some beauty in the perfume experience. Study 2 showed significantly higher prototypical and pleasing aesthetic emotions, and less negative aesthetic emotions were stimulated by a Werther's caramel candy compared with a control condition (an unflavored sugar cube); and 45% of participants found some beauty in the taste. In both studies the findings were unrelated to participants' levels of trait appreciation of beauty, as measured by the Engagement with Beauty Scale-Revised (EBS-R; Diessner, Pohling, Stacy, & Güsewell, 2018). In Study 3 we found that when the EBS-R predicted the response to an artwork, it did not predict gustatory beauty; and when the EBS-R predicted olfactory beauty, it did not predict the beauty of an artwork. Thus, the general trait of appreciating beauty, as measured by the EBS-R, may not extend to olfactory or gustatory beauty. The results are discussed in the context of philosophical approaches and empirical aesthetic research.
Cody Marrs, Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies: An Aesthetics of All Things. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, pp. 148, ISBN: 9780192871725. Reviewedby Pilar Martínez Benedí
Our past studies have led us to divide sensory experiences, including aesthetic ones derived from sensory sources, into two broad categories: biological and artifactual. The aesthetic experience of ...biological beauty is dictated by inherited brain concepts, which are resistant to change even in spite of extensive experience. The experience of artifactual beauty on the other hand is determined by post-natally acquired concepts, which are modifiable throughout life by exposure to different experiences (Zeki, 2009; Zeki and Chén, 2016). Hence, in terms of aesthetic rating, biological beauty (in which we include the experience of beautiful faces or human bodies) is characterized by less variability between individuals belonging to different ethnic origins and cultural backgrounds or the same individual at different times. Artifactual beauty (in which we include the aesthetic experience of human artifacts, such as buildings and cars) is characterized by greater variability between individuals belonging to different ethnic and cultural groupings and by the same individual at different times. In this paper, we present results to show that the experience of mathematical beauty (Zeki et al., 2014), even though it constitutes an extreme example of beauty that is dependent upon (mathematical) culture and learning, is consistent with one of the characteristics of the biological categories, namely a lesser variability in terms of the aesthetic ratings given to mathematical formulae experienced as beautiful.
In this work we study the interrelation between, on the one hand, subjective perception of female facial aesthetics, and on the other hand, selected objective parameters that include facial features, ...photo-quality, as well as non-permanent facial characteristics. This study seeks to provide insight on the role of this specific set of features in affecting the way humans perceive facial images. The approach is novel in that it jointly considers both previous results on photo quality and beauty assessment, as well as non-permanent facial characteristics and expressions. Based on 37 such objective parameters, we construct a metric that aims to quantify modifiable parameters for aesthetics enhancement, as well as tunes systems that would seek to predict the way humans perceive facial aesthetics. The proposed metric is evaluated on a face dataset, that includes images with variations in illumination, image quality, as well as age, ethnicity and expression. We show that our approach outperforms two state of the art beauty estimation metrics. In addition we apply the designed metric in three interesting datasets, where we assess beauty in images of females before and after plastic surgery, of females across time, as well as of females famous for their beauty. We conclude by giving insight towards beauty prediction.
Who is "beautiful" and who is "ugly"? My concept is one of the most controversial aesthetic concepts throughout history. For thousands of years, the goal of art has been to create a sense of beauty; ...In order to explore the nature of perception and spiritual pleasure. So desiring beauty and mobilizing ugly is a right for every human being, and it is certain that the taste and enjoyment of beauty varies between individuals. Because of the different ideologies, the culture of beauty was not fixed, as was the culture of ugliness. What is beautiful for some people is ugly for others, but the more a person elevates his thought beyond the limits of form and avoids the superficiality of vision. And looking at the inner features of things that seem ugly, he found a hidden beauty within them. The concept of ugliness cannot be separated from the concept of beauty, but rather it is an integral part of it. If beautiful always has specific standards and studied standards, while ugly is linked to the penetration of all these standards and standards, “there is no limit to ugly”, as soon as you set a standard for beauty, a similar standard to ugliness appears. As if he automatically reveals himself to enhance beauty. That is why contemporary arts have paid much attention to this concept, as it is an “aesthetic” concept that can express multiple artistic, social, political and philosophical visions, hence the idea of research based on entering into the depths of the ugly and treating the vision of “untouchable” things through the heart and the mind, and getting out of it with aesthetics, the criteria of “bad” become, and it carries with it many readings and interpretations that determine what these things are. That the work of art is the construction of one kidney and that each part is given a different significance.
Dress and Personal Appearance in Late Antiquity. The Clothing of the Middle and Lower Classes examines written, art historical and archaeological evidence to understand the way that cloth and ...clothing was made, embellished, cared for and recycled during this period.
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