BY VICTOR S. JOHNSTON
”And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being.” —Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch, 2013
FOR MOST PEOPLE, SELECTING A MATE IS A COMPLEX multifaceted decision of paramount importance for their future happiness. It is the stuff of great novels and plays, comedies and tragedies, filled with pleasure or fraught with pain. Given the high stakes involved in this life-changing decision it is both strange and remarkable that an apparently trivial attribute, physical beauty, should play such a prominent role. Our common sense tells us that physical beauty is merely a personal whim (“beauty is in the eye of the beholder”) or a frivolous quality (“beauty is only skin deep”) that we should ignore (“don’t judge a book by its cover”). Despite these admonitions, however, beauty is not ignored. Indeed, the enhancement of beauty has spawned several multi-billion dollar international businesses: the cosmetics industry, cosmetic surgery, and advertising. It appears that individuals are willing to invest a great deal of time, money, and effort in the pursuit of this ephemeral attribute. So perhaps there is more to beauty than meets the eye.