An Introduction to Beauty

Beauty is one of the most important aspects of a human being. Beauty is widely defined as a subjective feature of things which makes these things pleasant to see. These things may include sunsets, landscapes, beautiful humans and other works of art. Beauty, along with aesthetic sense and knowledge, is perhaps the most interesting branch of applied psychology, another of the main branches of psychology.

Aesthetic theories consider beauty as a mental state that involves the evaluation of three aspects: physical, psychological and sociological. The physical aspect considers such factors as the body structure and composition. Psychological aspects include psychological processes such as recognition, judgment and the ability to evaluate others. Sociological aspects are wider in the scope of beauty because they involve the attitudes, values and norms of people in general.

Beauty is not simply the subjective view of an object or a person. Beauty can be objectively measured through measurements and through the scientific methods of testing and investigation. Aesthetics has various theories in a wide range, with some focusing more on the role of human understanding on the process of beauty while others emphasize the involvement of culture, class and gender. Still others emphasize the importance of physical attractiveness as the most important feature of beauty. Beauty is thus taken to be an abstract quality, something that affects the beholder. Beauty therefore has a wide variety of definitions according to different theories, but beauty is always subjective.