The human ideal of a pretty face varies from culture to culture, of course, and over time, as Abraham Cowley noted in the seventeenth century:
Beauty, thou wild fantastic ape
Who dost in every country change thy shape!
But in general what we are probably looking for is a combination of mature and immature looks—the big eyes of a child, which make us feel protective, the high cheekbones and other features of a fully developed woman or man, which make us feel sexy. In an effort to look sexy, we pierce our noses, elongate our earlobes or necks, tattoo our skin, bind our feet, corset our ribs, dye our hair, have the fat liposuctioned from our thighs, and alter our bodies in countless other ways. Throughout most of western history, women were expected to be curvy, soft, and voluptuous, real earth mothers radiant with sensuous fertility. It was a preference with a strong evolutionary basis: A plump woman had a greater store of body fat and the nutrients needed for pregnancy, was more likely to survive during times of hunger, and would be able to protect her growing fetus and breastfeed it once it was born. In many areas of Africa and India, fat is considered not only beautiful but prestigious for both men and women. In the United States, in the Roaring Twenties and also in the Soaring Seventies and Eighties, when ultrathin was in, men wanted women to have the figures of teenage boys, and much psychological hay could be made from how this reflected the changing role of women in society and the work place. These days, most men I know prefer women to have a curvier, reasonably fit body, although most women I know would still prefer to be “too” thin.
But the face has always attracted an admirer’s first glances, especially the eyes, which can be so smoldery and eloquent, and throughout the ages people have emphasized their facial features with makeup. Archaeologists have found evidence of Egyptian perfumeries and beauty parlors dating to 4,000 B.C., and makeup paraphernalia going back to 6,000 B.C. The ancient Egyptians preferred green eye shadow topped with a glitter made from crushing the iridescent carapaces of certain beetles; kohl eye liner and mascara; blue-black lipstick; red rouge; and fingers and feet stained with henna. They shaved their eyebrows and drew in false ones. A fashionable Egyptian woman of those days outlined the veins on her breasts in blue and coated her nipples with gold. Her nail polish signaled social status, red indicating the highest. Men also indulged in elaborate potions and beautifiers; and not only for a night out: Tutankhamen’s tomb included jars of makeup and beauty creams for his use in the afterlife. Roman men adored cosmetics, and commanders had their hair coiffed and perfumed and their nails lacquered before they went into battle. Cosmetics appealed even more to Roman women, to one of whom Martial wrote in the first century A.D., “While you remain at home, Galla, your hair is at the hairdresser’s; you take out your teeth at night and sleep tucked away in a hundred cosmetic boxes—even your face does not sleep with you. Then you wink at men under an eyebrow you took out of a drawer that same morning.” A second-century Roman physician invented cold cream, the formula for which has changed little since then. We may remember from the Old Testament that Queen Jezebel painted her face before embarking on her wicked ways, a fashion she learned from the high-toned Phoenicians in about 850 B.C. In the eighteenth century, European women were willing to eat Arsenic Complexion Wafers to make their skin whiter; it poisoned the hemoglobin in the blood so that they developed a fragile, lunar whiteness. Rouges often contained such dangerous metals as lead and mercury, and when used as lip-stain they went straight into the bloodstream. Seventeenth-century European women and men sometimes wore beauty patches in the shape of hearts, suns, moons, and stars, applying them to their breasts and face, to draw an admirer’s eye away from any imperfections, which, in that era, too often included smallpox scars.
Studies conducted recently at the University of Louisville asked college men what they considered to be the ideal components in a woman’s face, and fed the results into a computer. They discovered that their ideal woman had wide cheekbones; eyes set high and wide apart; a smallish nose; high eyebrows; a small neat chin; and a smile that could fill half of the face. On faces deemed “pretty,” each eye was one-fourteenth as high as the face, and three-tenths its width; the nose didn’t occupy more than five percent of the face; the distance from the bottom lip to the chin was one fifth the height of the face, and the distance from the middle of the eye to the eyebrow was one-tenth the height of the face. Superimpose the faces of many beautiful women onto these computer ratios, and none will match up. What this geometry of beauty boils down to is a portrait of an ideal mother—a young, healthy woman. A mother had to be fertile, healthy, and energetic to protect her young and continue to bear lots of children, many of whom might die in infancy. Men drawn to such women had a stronger chance of their genes surviving. Capitalizing on the continuing subleties of that appeal, plastic surgeons sometimes advertise with extraordinary bluntness. A California surgeon, Dr. Vincent Forshan, once ran an eight-page color ad in Los Angeles magazine showing a gorgeous young woman with a large, high bosom, flat stomach, high, tight buttocks, and long sleek legs posing beside a red Ferrari. The headline over the photo ran: “Automobile by Ferrari … body by Forshan.” Question: What do those of us who aren’t tall, flawlessly sculpted adolescents do? Answer: Console ourselves with how relative beauty can be. Although it wins our first praise and the helpless gift of our attention, it can curdle before our eyes in a matter of moments. I remember seeing Omar Sharif in Doctor Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia, and thinking him astoundingly handsome. When I saw him being interviewed on television some months later, and heard him declare that his only interest in life was playing bridge, which is how he spent most of his spare time, to my great amazement he was transformed before my eyes into an unappealing man. Suddenly his eyes seemed rheumy and his chin stuck out too much and none of the pieces of his anatomy fell together in the right proportions. I’ve watched this alchemy work in reverse, too, when a not-particularly-attractive stranger opened his mouth to speak and became ravishing. Thank heavens for the arousing qualities of zest, intelligence, wit, curiosity, sweetness, passion, talent, and grace. Thank heavens that, though good looks may rally one’s attention, a lasting sense of a person’s beauty reveals itself in stages. Thank heavens, as Shakespeare puts it in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.”
We are not just lovers of one another’s features, of course, but also of nature’s. Our passion for beautiful flowers we owe entirely to insects, bats, and birds, since these pollinators and flowers evolved together; flowers use color to attract birds and insects that will pollinate them. We may breed flowers to the pitch of sense-pounding color and smell we prefer, and we’ve greatly changed the look of nature by doing so, but there is a special gloriousness we find only in nature at its most wild and untampered with. In our “sweet spontaneous earth,” as e. e. cummings calls it, we find startling and intimate beauties that fill us with ecstasy. Perhaps, like him, we
notice the convulsed orange inch of moon
perching on this silver minute of evening
and our pulse suddenly charges like cavalry, or our eyes close in pleasure and, in a waking faint, we sigh before we know what’s happening. The scene is so beautiful it deflates us. Moonlight can reassure us that there will be light enough to find our way over dark plains, or to escape a night-prowling beast. Sunset’s fiery glow reminds us of the warmth in which we thrive. The gushing colors of flowers signal springtime and summer, when food is plentiful and all life is radiantly fertile. Brightly colored birds turn us on, sympathetically, with their sexual flash and dazzle, because we’re atavists at heart and any sex pantomime reminds us of our own. Still, the essence of natural beauty is novelty and surprise. In cummings’s poem, it is an unexpected “convulsed orange inch of moon” that awakens one’s notice. When this happens, our sense of community widens—we belong not just to one another but to other species, other forms of matter. “That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone,??
? John Berger writes in The Sense of Sight, “that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.” Naturalists often say that they never tire of seeing the same mile of rain forest, or of strolling along the same paths through the savanna. But, if you press them, they inevitably add that there is always something new to behold, that it is always different. As Berger puts it: “beauty is always an exception, always in despite of. This is why it moves us.” And yet we also respond passionately to the highly organized way of beholding life we call art. To some extent Art is like trapping nature inside a paperweight. Suddenly a locale, or an abstract emotion, is viewable at one’s leisure, falls out of flux, can be rotated and considered from different vantage points, becomes as fixed and to that extent as holy as the landscape. As Berger puts it:
All the languages of art have been developed as an attempt to transform the instantaneous into the permanent. Art supposes that beauty is not an exception—is not in despite of—but is the basis for an order.… Art is an organized response to what nature allows us to glimpse occasionally.… the transcendental face of art is always a form of prayer.
Art is more complex than that, of course. Intense emotion is stressful, and we look to artists to feel for us, to suffer and rejoice, to describe the heights of their passionate response to life so that we can enjoy them from a safe distance, and get to know better what the full range of human experience really is. We may not choose to live out the extremes of consciousness we find in Jean Genet or Edvard Munch, but it’s wonderful to peer into them. We look to artists to stop time for us, to break the cycle of birth and death and temporarily put an end to life’s processes. It is too much of a whelm for any one person to face up to without going into sensory overload. Artists, on the other hand, court that intensity. We ask artists to fill our lives with a cavalcade of fresh sights and insights, the way life was for us when we were children and everything was new.* In time, much of life’s spectacle becomes a polite blur, because if we stop to consider every speckle-throated lily we will never get our letters filed or pomegranates bought.
Unbeautiful things often delight our eyes, too. Gargoyles, glitz, intense slabs of color, organized tricks of light. Sparklers and fireworks are almost painful to watch, but we call them beautiful. A flawless seven-carat marquise diamond is pure scintillation, which we also call beautiful. Throughout history, people have crafted nature’s rudest rocks into exquisite jewelry, obsessed with the way in which light penetrates a crystal. We may find diamonds and other gems visually magnificent, but seeing them the way we do is a recent innovation. It was only in the eighteenth century that the newly improved art of gem-cutting produced the glittery stones full of fire and dazzle we admire. Before that, even the crown jewels appeared dull and listless. But in the eighteenth century faceted cuts became fashionable, along with plunging necklines. In fact, women often wore jewels pinned to the necklines of their gowns so that each might draw attention to the other. Why should a gem strike us as beautiful? A diamond acts like a bunched prism. Light entering a diamond ricochets around inside it, reflects from the back of it, and spreads out its colors more ebulliently than through an ordinary glass prism. A skilled diamond cutter enables light to streak along inside the stone’s many facets and shoot out of the jewel at angles. Turn the diamond in your hand, and you see one pure color followed by another. Variety is the pledge that matter makes to living things. We find life’s energy, motion, and changing colors trapped in the small, dead space of a diamond, which one moment glitters like neon and the next spews out sabers of light. Our sense of wonder ignites, things are in the wrong place, a magical bonfire has been lit, the nonliving comes to life in an unexpected flash and begins a small, brief dance among the flames. Watching faces or fireworks or a spaceship launch, the dance is slower, but the colors and lights grow achingly intense as they surround and upstage us in a fantasia of pure visual ecstasy.
WATCHING A NIGHT LAUNCH
OF THE SPACE SHUTTLE
A huge glittering tower sparkles across the Florida marshlands. Floodlights reach into the heavens all around it, rolling out carpets of light. Helicopters and jets blink around the launch pad like insects drawn to flame. Oz never filled the sky with such diamond-studded improbability. Inside the cascading lights, a giant trellis holds a slender rocket to its heart, on each side a tall thermos bottle filled with solid fuel the color and feel of a hard eraser, and on its back a sharp-nosed space shuttle, clinging like the young of some exotic mammal. A full moon bulges low in the sky, its face turned toward the launch pad, its mouth open.
On the sober consoles of launch control, numbers count backward toward zero. When numbers vanish, and reverse time ends, something will disappear. Not the shuttle—that will stay with us through eyesight and radar, and be on the minds of dozens of tracking dishes worldwide, rolling their heads as if to relieve the anguish. For hours we have been standing on these Floridian bogs, longing for the blazing rapture of the moment ahead, longing to be jettisoned free from routine, and lifted, like the obelisk we launch, that much nearer the infinite. On the fog-wreathed banks of the Banana River, and by the roadside lookouts, we are waiting: 55,000 people are expected at the Space Center alone.
When floodlights die on the launch pad, camera shutters and mental shutters all open in the same instant. The air feels loose and damp. A hundred thousand eyes rush to one spot, where a glint below the booster rocket flares into a pinwheel of fire, a sparkler held by hand on the Fourth of July. White clouds shoot out in all directions, in a dust storm of flame, a gritty, swirling Sahara, burning from gray-white to an incandescent platinum so raw it makes your eyes squint, to a radiant gold so narcotic you forget how to blink. The air is full of bee stings, prickly and electric. Your pores start to itch. Hair stands up stiff on the back of your neck. It used to be that the launch pad would melt at lift-off, but now 300,000 gallons of water crash from aloft, burst from below. Steam clouds scent the air with a mineral ash. Crazed by reflection, the waterways turn the color of pounded brass. Thick cumulus clouds shimmy and build at ground level, where you don’t expect to see thunderheads.
Seconds into the launch, an apricot whoosh pours out in spasms, like the rippling quarters of a palomino, and now outbleaches the sun, as clouds rise and pile like a Creation scene. Birds leap into the air along with moths and dragonflies and gnats and other winged creatures, all driven to panic by the clamor: booming, crackling, howling downwind. What is flight, that it can take place in the fragile wings of a moth, whose power station is a heart small as a computer chip? What is flight, that it can groan upward through 4.5 million pounds of dead weight on a colossal gantry? Close your eyes, and you hear the deafening rat-a-tat-tat of firecrackers, feel them arcing against your chest. Open your eyes, and you see a huge steel muscle dripping fire, as seven million pounds of thrust pauses a moment on a silver haunch, and then the bedlam clouds let rip. Iron struts blow over the launch pad like newspapers, and shock waves roll out, pounding their giant fists, pounding the marshes where birds shriek and fly, pounding against your chest, where a heart already rapid begins running clean away from you. The air feels tight as a drum, the molecules bouncing. Suddenly the space shuttle leaps high over the marshlands, away from the now frantic laughter of the loons, away from the reedy delirium of the insects and the open-mouthed awe of the spectators, many of whom are crying, as it rises on a waterfall of flame 700 feet long, shooting colossal sparks as it climbs in a golden halo that burns deep into memory.
Only ten minutes from lift-off, it will leave the security blanket of our atmosphere, and enter an orbit 184 miles up. This is not miraculous. After all, we humans began in an early tantrum of the universe, when our chemical makeup first took form. We evolved through accidents, happenstance, near misses, and good luck. We developed language, forged cities, mustered nations. Now we change the course of rivers and move mountains; we hold back trillions of tons of water with cement dams. We break into human chests and heads
; operate on beating hearts and thinking brains. What is defying gravity compared to that? In orbit, there will be no night and day, no up and down. No one will have their “feet on the ground.” No joke will be “earthy.” No point will be “timely.” No thrill will be “out of this world.” In orbit, the sun will rise every hour and a half, and there will be 112 days to each week. But then time has always been one of our boldest and most ingenious inventions, and, when you think about it, one of the least plausible of our fictions.
Lunging to the east out over the water, the shuttle rolls slowly onto its back, climbing at three g’s, an upshooting torch, twisting an umbilical of white cloud beneath it. When the two solid rockets fall free, they hover to one side like bright red quotation marks, beginning an utterance it will take four days to finish. For over six minutes of seismic wonder it is still visible, this star we hurl up at the star-studded sky. What is a neighborhood? one wonders. Is it the clump of wild daisies beside the Banana River, in which moths hover and dive without the aid of rockets? For large minds, the Earth is a small place. Not small enough to exhaust in one lifetime, but a compact home, cozy, buoyant, a place to cherish, the spectral center of our life. But how could we stay at home forever?